Start Date: December 6, 2024
I am watching TV cable news and hear the drum beat sound that tells me the video will be overtaken ALERT, “Breaking News.” Viewers are told of a MASS SHOOTING event. The shooter is dead. Some number of people shot, unknown conditions. Reporters will be sent to the scene. It ends fairly quickly as there were a swarm of police who were able to take out the shooter. It was a university campus in Las Vegas. The shooter was apparently a professor applying for a job. He was declined. Maybe lack of coping skills for stress could be a reason, given that shooting up the campus was his response to rejection. Though these days universities seem to be cultivating the notion of violent response to the most minor of imagined offenses. So perhaps this is the fruits of their labors. In any case it is tragic for innocent people to lose their lives. Now, the day after, it is a lead story on the internet [1], [2], [3].
It was April 15, a sunny Sunday in the San Fernando Valley. Maybe you were reading the paper, sleeping in, or even going to church. In Northridge hard working Hispanic men were not watching the Dodgers with friends or picnicking in the park with family. They were out looking for opportunities to work on the Christian day of rest. They saw a business building that had been vandalized with gang tagging. They asked the owner for a job painting over the graffiti. He agreed and paid to have the destruction of his property repaired. But then Jamal Jackson showed up. Mr. Jackson is a gang member who has achieved ex-con status and release by the age of 24. Perhaps more. He is also the perpetrator of the vandalism. Apparently he was offended that they didn’t appreciate his art. So he shot the workers and anyone else in the region of the parking lot. Four victims. Juan Lopez-Suarez was shot multiple times in the chest. He was dead when he arrived at the hospital. A second victim, a 69-year old, had a longer decline, suffering months of dying until he breathed his last in June. The other two victims were hospitalized and recovered. Though we don’t know the damages, physical, mental, and financial, I am probably one of a half dozen people, other than relatives or witnesses, who remember it. If you didn’t catch the minute or two on the local news that night you probably have never heard of it. So much for BREAKING NEWS. The killer was caught in a few days. It seems he didn’t give much consideration to his life or anyone else’s [4], [5], [6].
For something to be “news” it has to be vaguely “new.” This was not. Just the Saturday before, eight days earlier, a drug dealer was conducting a sale in the parking lot of a busy shopping center at roughly 4pm. It is hard to remember, but there once was a time when drug dealers made an effort to be discreet. Not so much anymore. I don’t know what went wrong. Customer service isn’t what it used to be. But somehow the dealer ended up shooting 4 of the people he was meeting, one fatally. Again, this was in a busy shopping center parking lot in mid-afternoon on a Saturday. There was a feeble attempt at a getaway but he was then involved in a hit-and-run crash and changed vehicle. Given the traffic here, he was eventually caught. All in all it seems a lack of executive thinking. By the way, these are the rather good neighborhoods [7].
A TV police drama in the mid-2000’s had an episode where a detective was questioning a Hispanic man from a poor area about a murder in his neighborhood. His response as to why someone might have been shot was along the lines of “Because it’s Tuesday”, i.e. people get killed everyday [8]. No one but the family even looks up.
It seems that a “mass shooting” is more interesting if the victims are wealthy young kids or black church goers. A shooter of note best involve a crazy white guy. The Las Vegas shooter seems to qualify. He was a white university professor. I am going to posit the “crazy” part since he got himself killed shooting up a campus over a job at the age of 67.
So the same people highlighting the “Mass Shooting” in Las Vegas pretty much couldn’t care less about a gang member using an illegally obtained gun (he was a convicted felon) to
kill Hispanic laborers trying to work while you were having Sunday brunch. Nothing to see here. D.A. Gascon will probably have the shooter out in a few years. He must have been a victim of some systemic something, right? Shooting breaks out at an illegal drug sale in a crowded parking lot in a state that thought decriminalizing was a good idea. Not a surprise. Not news.
But there is another form of mass shooting that is truly underreported and catastrophic.
In a 24 hour period spanning November 6-7, 2023 four L.A. County Sheriff”s Deputies, three active and one recently retired, independently commit suicide [9]. By any sane standard this has to be exceptional. It did make for some discussion on the local Fox affiliate. But I doubt that you saw it on any network.
Law enforcement is now a terrible job. Increasingly the leadership is politically appointed or sponsored. The criminals come after you. The customers, i.e. the citizenry, complain that you don’t do enough to stop crime, but then assail anything you do to prevent or respond to crime. Then the boss throws you under the bus when the customers or the criminals go to the complaint desk. Add in 70-hour work weeks, strained family relationships, and getting to witness the most gruesome consequences of humanity at its most depraved. All while saying “I’m fine” so that you don’t lose your job for being unstable.
For the year 2023 the count of LASD suicides is 8, 9 counting the retired officer. To be clear this does not include the LAPD or the CA Highway Patrol. This all happened less than two months after the execution style assassination of a beloved 30 year old Sheriff’s Deputy, just days after his engagement [10].
L.A. District Attorney Gascon had a media event to announce the capture of a man who had killed 3 homeless individuals, making little note of the 4th victim who was killed as part of a follow home robbery. But when a young Sheriff’s Deputy was executed in his vehicle the D.A. did not appear at the scene, or at the media event announcing the reward from the county supervisors, or at the press event to announce the capture of the assassin. He quickly explained why he wouldn’t bother seeking the highest penalty. Clearly some victims matter more than others.
A cursory review of the internet indicates that there are roughly 700,000 law enforcement officers in the United States [11]. Statistics are a little hard to come by, but in 2020 it is reported that 116 officers died by suicide, versus 113 dying in service. That is a tragic indication that the greater hazard is the pain of doing the job, as opposed to the intrinsic threat. In every profession people burn out and quit. Suicide is a much bigger statement. Like veterans with PTSD, it suggests that they were so damaged that they couldn’t imagine carrying on in any capacity [12] [13]. It seems that the chiefs, city councils, mayors, D.A.s and citizens who want to fire, sue, or incarcerate law enforcement may be harder to deal with than the criminals who shoot to kill. What an indictment of societal values.
Using the above numbers roughly 1 out of 6000 or so law enforcement officers took their lives in 2020.
Now think about L.A. County having eight active, and one retired, Sheriff’s Deputies kill themselves in one year. They have less than 10,000 sworn deputies. That would indicate a 2023 LASD suicide rate approaching 1/1000, six times the number of law enforcement in entirety.
The county of Los Angeles has 10,000,000 residents. Were they to take their lives at the same pace as the deputies there would be nearly 10,000 suicides per year.
Now that is a MASS SHOOTING event and then some.
So where is the BREAKING NEWS Alert ?
REFERENCES
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67642512
[4] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/arrest-northridge-drive-by-shooting/3136083/
[7] https://abc7.com/west-hills-los-angeles-california-shooting-investigation/13067023/
[8] https://majorcrimesdivision.fandom.com/wiki/Sudden_Death
[9] https://abc7.com/los-angeles-county-sheriffs-department-suicide-deaths-lasd-employees/14036429/
[10] https://lasd.org/update-on-the-murder-of-deputy-ryan-clinkunbroomer-in-palmdale/
[12] https://sites.bu.edu/daniellerousseau/2023/02/28/police-officer-suicide-and-suicide-prevention/