Post by Admin on Dec 5, 2015 17:13:15 GMT
Collective behavior
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_behavior
The expression collective behavior was first used by Robert E. Park (1921), and employed later by Herbert Blumer (1939), Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian (1957), and Neil Smelser (1962) to refer to social processes and events which do not reflect existing social structure (laws, conventions, and institutions), but which emerge in a "spontaneous" way. Use of the term has been expanded to include reference to cells, social animals like birds and fish, and insects including ants. Collective behavior takes many forms but generally violates societal norms (Miller 2000, Locher 2002). Collective behavior can be tremendously destructive, as with riots or mob violence, silly, as with fads, or anywhere in between. Collective behavior is always driven by group dynamics, encouraging people to engage in acts they might consider unthinkable under typical social circumstances (Locher 2002).
Defining the field
Turner and Killian (1957) were the first sociologists to back their theoretical propositions with visual evidence in the form of photographs and motion pictures of collective behavior in action. Prior to that sociologists relied heavily upon eyewitness accounts, which turned out to be far less reliable than one would hope.
Turner and Killian's approach is based largely upon the arguments of Blumer, who argued that social "forces" are not really forces. The actor is active: He creates an interpretation of the acts of others, and acts on the basis of this interpretation.
Examples
Here are some instances of collective behavior: the Los Angeles riot of 1992, the hula-hoop fad of 1958, the stock market crashes of 1929, and the "phantom gasser" episodes in Virginia in 1933-34 and Mattoon, IL in 1944 (Locher 2002, Miller 2000). The claim that such diverse episodes all belong to a single field of inquiry is a theoretical assertion, and not all sociologists would agree with it. But Blumer and Neil Smelser did agree, as did others, indicating that the formulation has satisfied some leading sociological thinkers.
Four forms
Although there are several other schema that may be used to classify forms of collective behavior the following four categories from Blumer (1939) are generally considered useful by most sociologists.
The crowd
Scholars differ about what classes of social events fall under the rubric of collective behavior. In fact, the only class of events which all authors include is crowds. Clark McPhail is one of those who treats crowds and collective behavior as synonyms. Although some consider McPhail's work overly simplistic (Locher 2002), his important contribution is to have gone beyond the speculations of others to carry out pioneering empirical studies of crowds. He finds them to form an elaborate set of types.
The classic treatment of crowds is Gustave LeBon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896), in which the author interpreted the crowds of the French Revolution as irrational reversions to animal emotion, and inferred from this that such reversion is characteristic of crowds in general. LeBon believed that crowds somehow induced people to lose their ability to think rationally and to somehow recover this ability once they had left the crowd. He speculated, but could not explain how this might occur. Freud expressed a similar view in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922). Such authors have thought that their ideas were confirmed by various kinds of crowds, one of these being the economic bubble. In Holland, during the tulip mania (1637), the prices of tulip bulbs rose to astronomical heights. An array of such crazes and other historical oddities is narrated in Charles MacKay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841).
At the University of Chicago, Robert Park and Herbert Blumer agreed with the speculations of LeBon and other that crowds are indeed emotional. But to them a crowd is capable of any emotion, not only the negative ones of anger and fear.
A number of authors modify the common-sense notion of the crowd to include episodes during which the participants are not assembled in one place but are dispersed over a large area. Turner and Killian refer to such episodes as diffuse crowds, examples being Billy Graham's revivals, panics about sexual perils, witch hunts and Red scares. Their expanded definition of the crowd is justified if propositions which hold true among compact crowds do so for diffuse crowds as well.
Some psychologists have claimed that there are three fundamental human emotions: fear, joy, and anger. Neil Smelser, John Lofland, and others have proposed three corresponding forms of the crowd: the panic (an expression of fear), the craze (an expression of joy), and the hostile outburst (an expression of anger). Each of the three emotions can characterize either a compact or a diffuse crowd, the result being a scheme of six types of crowds. Lofland has offered the most explicit discussion of these types.
The public
Park distinguishes the crowd, which expresses a common emotion, from a public, which discusses a single issue. Thus, a public is not equivalent to all of the members of a society. Obviously, this is not the usual use of the word, "public." To Park and Blumer, there are as many publics as there are issues. A public comes into being when discussion of an issue begins, and ceases to be when it reaches a decision on it.
The mass
To the crowd and the public Blumer adds a third form of collective behavior, the mass. It differs from both the crowd and the public in that it is defined not by a form of interaction but by the efforts of those who use the mass media to address an audience. The first mass medium was printing.
The social movement
Main article: Social movement
We change intellectual gears when we confront Blumer's final form of collective behavior, the social movement. He identifies several types of these, among which are active social movements such as the French Revolution and expressive ones such as Alcoholics Anonymous. An active movement tries to change society; an expressive one tries to change its own members.
The social movement is the form of collective behavior which satisfies least well the first definition of it which was offered at the beginning of this article. These episodes are less fluid than the other forms, and do not change as often as other forms do. Furthermore, as can be seen in the history of the labor movement and many religious sects, a social movement may begin as collective behavior but over time become firmly established as a social institution.
For this reason, social movements are often considered a separate field of sociology. The books and articles about them are far more numerous than the sum of studies of all the other forms of collective behavior put together. Social movements are considered in many Wikipedia articles, and an article on the field of social movements as a whole would be much longer than this essay.
The study of collective behavior spun its wheels for many years, but began to make progress with the appearance of Turner and Killian's "Collective Behavior" (1957) and Smelser's Theory of Collective Behavior (1962). Both books pushed the topic of collective behavior back into the consciousness of American sociologists and both theories contributed immensely to our understanding of collective behavior (Locher 2002, Miller 2000). Social disturbances in the U. S. and elsewhere in the late '60s and early '70s inspired another surge of interest in crowds and social movements. These studies presented a number of challenges to the armchair sociology of earlier students of collective behavior.
Theories developed to explain crowd behavior
Social scientists have developed theories to explain crowd behavior.
1. Contagion Theory - the Contagion Theory was formulated by Gustave Le Bon. According to Le Bon crowds exert a hypnotic influence over their members. Shielded by their anonymity, large numbers of people abandon personal responsibility and surrender to the contagious emotions of the crowd. A crowd thus assumes a life of its own, stirring up emotions and driving people toward irrational, even violent action (LeBon 1895). Le Bon's Theory, although one of the earliest explanations of crowd behavior, is still accepted by many people outside of sociology. However, critics argue that the "collective mind" has not been documented by systematic studies. Furthermore, although collective behavior may involve strong emotions, such feelings are not necessarily irrational. Turner and Killian (1957) argue convincingly that the "contagion" never actually occurs and participants in collective behavior do not lose their ability to think rationally.
2. Convergence Theory - whereas the Contagion Theory states that crowds cause people to act in a certain way, Convergence theory states that people who want to act in a certain way come together to form crowds. Developed by Floyd Allport (1924) and later expanded upon by Neil Miller and John Dollard (1941) as "Learning Theory," the central argument of all convergence theories is that collective behavior reveals the otherwise hidden tendencies of the individuals who take part in the episode. It asserts that people with similar attributes find other like-minded persons with whom they can release these underlying tendencies. People sometimes do things in a crowd that they would not have the courage to do alone because crowds can diffuse responsibility but the behavior itself is claimed to originate within the individuals. Crowds, in addition, can intensify a sentiment simply by creating a critical mass of like-minded people.
3. Emergent-Norm Theory - according to Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian (1957), crowds begin as collectivities composed of people with mixed interests and motives. Especially in the case of less stable crowds—expressive, acting and protest crowds—norms may be vague and changing, as when one person decides to break the glass windows of a store and others join in and begin looting merchandise. When people find themselves in a situation that is vague, ambiguous, or confusing new norms "emerge" on the spot and people follow those emergent norms, which may be at odds with normal social behavior. Turner and Killian further argue that there are several different categories of participants, all of whom follow different patterns of behavior due to their differing motivations.
4. Value-added Theory - Neil Smelser (1962) argues that collective behavior is actually a sort of release valve for built-up tension ("strain") within the social system, community, or group. If the proper determinants are present then collective behavior becomes inevitable. Conversely, if any of the key determinants are not present no collective behavior will occur unless and until the missing determinants fall into place. These are primarily social, although physical factors such as location and weather may also contribute to or hinder the development of collective behavior.
5. Complex Adaptive Systems theory - Dutch scholar Jaap van Ginneken claims that contagion, convergence and emergent norms are just instances of the synergy, emergence and autopoiesis or self-creation of patterns and new entities typical for the newly discovered meta-category of complex adaptive systems. This also helps explain the key role of salient details and path-dependence in rapid shifts.
See also:
Bandwagon effect
Collective consciousness
Collective effervescence
Collective intelligence
Collective hysteria
Collective narcissism
Complex adaptive systems
Crowd manipulation
Crowd psychology
Systems science
Bioengineering
Penis panic
Peer pressure
Social comparison theory
Spiral of silence
Herd behavior
Group behavior
Herd morality
Sheeple
Keeping up with the Joneses
Theories of political behavior
Moral panic
Bibliography:
Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841.
Herbert Blumer, "Collective Behavior," in A. M. Lee, ed., Principles of Sociology, New York, Barnes & Noble, 1951, pp. 67–121.
Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1962.
Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M. Killian, Collective Behavior, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice-Hall, 1957 1st ed., 2d ed., 1972; 3d. ed. 1987; 4th ed. 1993.
Kurt Lang and Gladys Lang, Collective Dynamics
John Lofland, Protest...
James B. Rule, Theories of Civil Violence, Berkeley, University of California, 1988.
Clark McPhail, The Myth of the Madding Crowd, New York, Aldine de Gruyter, 1991.
Basco Michael, Socio Anthropology " Mendiola Manila.
Jaap van Ginneken, Collective behavior and public opinion – Rapid shifts in opinion and communication, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003.
Giovanni Naldi, Lorenzo Pareschi, Giuseppe Toscani, Mathematical modelling of collective behavior in socio-economic and life sciences, Birkhauser, (2010).
Locher, David A., Collective Behavior, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.
Miller, David L., Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2000 2d ed., 1985.
Park, Robert E and Ernest W. Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Allport, Floyd. 1924. Social Psychology. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, The Riverside Press.
Miller, Neil and John Dollard. 1941. Social Learning and Imitation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
LeBon, Gustave. 1895. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Atlanta: Cherokee Publishing Company.
External links:
Group Experiment Environments (GEE) project, sponsored by the Percepts and Concepts Laboratory at Indiana University
References:
> Gordon, Deborah M. (11 March 2014). "The Ecology of Collective Behavior". PLoS Biol 12 (3). doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001805. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[(.......When the good people refuse to use this, the bad people rule and school. Be the first to do good and give the bad no room to wiggle without banning them. If you ban them, they only work their evil undetected, they are the ones that observe no rules. In the case of Collective Behavior, it is another thing to watch out for. In the past we called this "mob rule" and it is often hijacked into evil actions used against humanity. Flash mobs started out evil and was turned into good by meeting to sing or collective dances. Don't let them start to begin with is a better option: another "fad" was the social media triggered "Knockout Game" that sent kids out to knock down/punch the unsuspecting elderly on the street which was Horrific abuse against humanity, yet kids still did it... allow NO Excuses, not "no fear". Fear Protects Us All; it should not be erased as our societial morals, values and norms have been assaulted. Choose social movement, not collective behavior.
It's odd how at this point I'm remembering GP's "Conscious Uncoupling from that singer....)]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Herd behavior
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_behavior
Herd behavior describes how individuals in a group can act collectively without centralized direction. The term can refer to the behavior of animals in herds, packs, bird flocks, fish schools and so on, as well as the behavior of humans in demonstrations, riots and general strikes, sporting events, religious gatherings, episodes of mob violence and everyday decision-making, judgement and opinion-forming.
Raafat, Chater and Frith proposed an integrated approach to herding, describing two key issues, the mechanisms of transmission of thoughts or behavior between individuals and the patterns of connections between them. They suggested that bringing together diverse theoretical approaches of herding behavior illuminates the applicability of the concept to many domains, ranging from cognitive neuroscience to economics.
In Animals:
A group of animals fleeing from a predator shows the nature of herd behavior. In 1971, in the oft cited article "Geometry For The Selfish Herd," evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton asserted that each individual group member reduces the danger to itself by moving as close as possible to the center of the fleeing group. Thus the herd appears as a unit in moving together, but its function emerges from the uncoordinated behavior of self-serving individuals.
Symmetry-breaking:
Asymmetric aggregation of animals under panic conditions has been observed in many species, including humans, mice, and ants. Theoretical models have demonstrated symmetry-breaking similar to observations in empirical studies. For example, when panicked individuals are confined to a room with two equal and equidistant exits, a majority will favor one exit while the minority will favor the other.
Possible mechanisms for this behavior include Hamilton’s selfish herd theory, neighbor copying, or the byproduct of communication by social animals or runaway positive feedback.
Characteristics of escape panic include:
- Individuals attempt to move faster than normal.
- Interactions between individuals become physical.
- Exits become arched and clogged.
- Escape is slowed by fallen individuals serving as obstacles.
- Individuals display a tendency towards mass or copied behavior.
- Alternative or less used exits are overlooked.
[(......DO NOT let this happen! It is what terrorists try to instigate when instigating events in stadiums and theaters. ALWAYS stay calm, cool, and collected. Always, without exception. .....)]
In human societies:
The philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were among the first to criticize what they referred to as "the crowd" (Kierkegaard) and "herd morality" and the "herd instinct" (Nietzsche) in human society. Modern psychological and economic research has identified herd behavior in humans to explain the phenomena of large numbers of people acting in the same way at the same time. The British surgeon Wilfred Trotter popularized the "herd behavior" phrase in his book, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1914). In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen explained economic behavior in terms of social influences such as "emulation," where some members of a group mimic other members of higher status. In "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903), early sociologist George Simmel referred to the "impulse to sociability in man", and sought to describe "the forms of association by which a mere sum of separate individuals are made into a 'society' ". Other social scientists explored behaviors related to herding, such as Freud (crowd psychology), Carl Jung (collective unconscious), and Gustave Le Bon (the popular mind). Swarm theory observed in non-human societies is a related concept and is being explored as it occurs in human society.
Stock market bubbles:
Large stock market trends often begin and end with periods of frenzied buying (bubbles) or selling (crashes). Many observers cite these episodes as clear examples of herding behavior that is irrational and driven by emotion—greed in the bubbles, fear in the crashes. Individual investors join the crowd of others in a rush to get in or out of the market.
Some followers of the technical analysis school of investing see the herding behavior of investors as an example of extreme market sentiment. The academic study of behavioral finance has identified herding in the collective irrationality of investors, particularly the work of Nobel laureates Vernon L. Smith, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, and Robert Shiller.
Hey and Morone (2004) analyzed a model of herd behavior in a market context. Their work is related to at least two important strands of literature. The first of these strands is that on herd behavior in a non-market context. The seminal references are Banerjee (1992) and Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and Welch (1992), both of which showed that herd behavior may result from private information not publicly shared. More specifically, both of these papers showed that individuals, acting sequentially on the basis of private information and public knowledge about the behavior of others, may end up choosing the socially undesirable option. The second of the strands of literature motivating this paper is that of information aggregation in market contexts. A very early reference is the classic paper by Grossman and Stiglitz (1976) that showed that uninformed traders in a market context can become informed through the price in such a way that private information is aggregated correctly and efficiently. In this strand of the literature, the most commonly used empirical methodologies to test for herding toward the average, are the works of Christie and Huang (1995) and Chang, Cheng and Khorana (2000). Overall, it was shown that it is possible to observe herd-type behavior in a market context. The results refer to a market with a well-defined fundamental value. Even if herd behavior might only be observed rarely, this has important consequences for a whole range of real markets – most particularly foreign exchange markets.
One such herdish incident was the price volatility that surrounded the 2007 Uranium bubble, which started with flooding of the Cigar Lake Mine in Saskatchewan, during the year 2006.
In crowds
Main article: Crowd psychology
Crowds that gather on behalf of a grievance can involve herding behavior that turns violent, particularly when confronted by an opposing ethnic or racial group. The Los Angeles riots of 1992, New York Draft Riots and Tulsa Race Riot are notorious in U.S. history. The idea of a "group mind" or "mob behavior" was put forward by the French social psychologists Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon.
Everyday decision-making
"Benign" herding behaviors may occur frequently in everyday decisions based on learning from the information of others, as when a person on the street decides which of two restaurants to dine in. Suppose that both look appealing, but both are empty because it is early evening; so at random, this person chooses restaurant A. Soon a couple walks down the same street in search of a place to eat. They see that restaurant A has customers while B is empty, and choose A on the assumption that having customers makes it the better choice. Because other passersby do the same thing into the evening, restaurant A does more business that night than B. This phenomenon is also referred as an information cascade.
See also:
Bandwagon effect
Collective behavior
Collective consciousness
Collective effervescence
Collective intelligence
Crowd psychology
Conformity
Group behavior
Groupthink
Herd mentality
Hive mind
Informational cascade
Mass hysteria
Mean world syndrome
Meme
Mob rule
Moral panic
Propaganda
Self-organization
Sheeple
Social proof
Socionomics
Spontaneous order
Swarm intelligence
Team player
The 2009 Birmingham, Millennium Point stampede
Riot
Stampede
Symmetry breaking of escaping ants
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[(........I had not realized just how long we've been combatting terrorism inmass society. Here is an example of mentally manipulated incidents that were happening in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, all the major (and some minor) cities across the nation. It is from 2011; and they were incidents from kids of all backgrounds and nationalities. Bad behavior is terrorism no matter who is doing it, and we must work together to stop it. It is FAR easier to work on combatting this stuff by all working together in Unity. Thank you so much for helping to make all our lives better!! <3....)]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
'Knockout game' case shocked St. Louis, then fell apart
www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/knockout-game-case-shocked-st-louis-then-fell-apart/article_cdf5032a-b65e-51e0-a84e-de0f0ce0c5f8.html
March 04, 2012 10:15 am • BY TODD C. FRANKEL
ST. LOUIS • The police captain couldn't believe it. He had the Knockout King in his office.
It was September 2011, and police were struggling to get a handle on a series of vicious knockout assaults in south St. Louis. Groups of teens were cold-cocking older pedestrians at random. One was dead, several injured. Residents were alarmed, police baffled. It didn't make sense, such a cruel and cowardly crime.
Now, sitting in Capt. Jerry Leyshock's office was an important key to the mystery: the Knockout King. That was the teen's nickname, said the four other young men also swept up that night by police after yet another assault. They sat inside South Patrol headquarters. And the ringleader, they said, happened to be right over there.
Leyshock took stock of the young man in his office. The kid looked 17 or 18. He was stocky, his hair cut in short dreadlocks. He wore a hooded sweatshirt. The captain, who coached youth boxing, thought he recognized the teen as a boxer from the Cherokee Recreation Center. The teen, for now, revealed little. Then he mentioned he was 16, a juvenile. Too young to talk with police alone. The interview was over.
In a moment, the teens would be released. But first, Leyshock, in his white dress shirt and black tie, gold badge on his chest, leaned in close.
"I think it's a safe bet we're going to pay you a visit whenever a knockout case comes up," the captain said.
The meeting with the Knockout King would turn out to be a crucial break in a crime that hadn't occurred yet — a case of cavalier brutality that would shock a city, especially after the accused attackers were set free.
On Oct. 21, Matt Quain, 52, a dishwasher, was severely beaten in a knockout assault on South Grand Boulevard. The mayor helped rescue him. Seven middle schoolers, some as young as 12, were arrested. Then, at a juvenile court hearing in January, the main witness, a 13-year-old classmate of the defendants, failed to show up. The case was tossed out.
The kids celebrated. Others howled.
"People all over the city of St. Louis are outraged over this," Mayor Francis Slay said.
The case seemed to captivate the city with a series of difficult questions: Why was this happening? How would it stop? Was witness intimidation a factor?
The story of how police cracked the case, only to see it fall apart, shows the unusual challenges posed by knockout assaults, as well as the communitywide frustrations. The crimes were rare, but terrorizing. These were not muggings. Something else was at play here. It was a matter of finding out what, even if the answers were unsettling.
• • •
The summer of 2011 had started quietly enough, with no hint that knockout assaults would be a problem in the fall.
This was a surprise. In April, four teens had attacked a 72-year-old Vietnamese immigrant and his wife as they walked home from a market in Dutchtown. Hoang Nguyen died. His wife was hurt. An 18-year-old man, who allegedly told police he just wanted to knock someone out, was charged with first-degree murder.
"Knockout game" became the crime's coarse moniker. But it didn't feel like the start of something new. No one saw it as the sign of a wave of random assaults. After all, violent crime rates were falling across the city.
Then, in late August, several bicyclists were jumped in the Shaw neighborhood. In September, a group of teens pummeled a 59-year-old man as he walked near Grand and Gravois Road. Police rounded up the Knockout King and the other teens. But the pedestrian said he never got a good look at his attackers.
And once again, the knockout attacks seemed to fade away. Until October 21.
It was a cool autumn night, a Friday. Quain and neighbor Jon Kelly watched a Blues game on TV and then walked to a nearby Schnucks to buy some beer. On the way back, the pair walked by the Carpenter city library in the 3300 block of Grand. They could see, just ahead, the bright lights of the South Grand business district. Home was two blocks away.
At the same time, Mayor Slay was returning from a Pink Floyd tribute show at the Fox Theatre. His bodyguard, Sgt. Blaise Peluso, was at the wheel. As they neared the library, Slay looked out the window. He saw a group of kids crowding the sidewalk.
That doesn't look right, he told Peluso.
The group walked in front of the mayor's car, across Grand. Slay noted how relaxed they looked. He glanced back at the library. He saw a man facedown in the street, motionless, feet inches from the curb, blood pooling on the pavement.
Slay thought the man had been shot. Peluso pulled over. The teens kept walking, unhurried, on the other side of the street now, past an idling car. The car's driver had stopped when he saw Quain fall to the pavement. He heard the impact's "thump" even with his windows rolled up. The 49-year-old city resident watched the teens cross behind him. They looked like little kids, he thought. They laughed and held aloft cellphones like they were snapping pictures.
The teens disappeared from view.
• • •
Quain suffered a broken jaw. The incident seemed like an echo of the fatal assault in April. And the mayor's role made the incident loom only larger. This was suddenly a high-profile case.
And police were struggling with it. At least nine officers had descended on the scene that Friday night, hoping to turn up a lead. Nothing. The teens were gone. The witnesses couldn't identify anyone. Police had little to go on. The case threatened to slip away.
Leyshock decided it was time to visit the Knockout King.
"I wanted to see how he played me, feel him out," the captain said.
He stopped by the Cherokee rec center in Benton Park. The captain knew the boxing coach there, Jesse Davison.
Davison ran a tight program. He told his young boxers to stay out of trouble so often they called him the Preacher Man. "Use your fists in the ring, not on the street," he liked to tell them.
Some of his boxers had made the Olympic trials. But Davison tried to keep even the troublemakers coming around. At least then he could influence them. When the captain showed up, Davison suspected which boxer he wanted to see. The teen had long been a challenge. A couple years ago, the teen's mother had brought the kid to the gym asking for help with her out-of-control son. "He's a good kid," the boxing coach says, "but he's just going down the wrong path."
The boxing gym sits on the second floor, centered on a worn-out blue Budweiser boxing mat. The Knockout King was throwing punches at a heavy bag. Leyshock sat down on a red weight bench. He called the teen over.
You know why I'm here, the captain said.
It wasn't me or my crew, the teen replied.
Leyshock couldn't press him. It was too early in the investigation, but he'd made a point. Police would be back.
It took just one more day. At South Patrol's 10 a.m. roll call, a sergeant read aloud an update of recent crimes and concerns. The Quain incident was mentioned. Officer Brian Eisele perked up.
Eisele was 29. He was built like a college wrestler, short but muscular. He'd been on the force three years. As a patrolman, he knew about the knockout assaults. He was familiar with the area where Quain was assaulted. A middle school was nearby. So was Gravois Park. And Eisele knew that one teen's name kept coming up: the Knockout King.
Eisele wasn't a detective, but he decided to chase this case between radio calls. When roll call ended, he grabbed his partner, rookie patrolman Kevin Bambrick.
They started at Gravois Park, not far from where Quain was attacked. The patrolmen walked to a large gazebo in the center. Gang activity was a problem here. Police regularly chased off people who lingered past the small city park's 10 p.m. curfew. At least twice Eisele had taken the Knockout King home after curfew violations. Eisele spotted graffiti on the gazebo. One phrase stood out: "TKO zone Stay Out."
TKO. It means "technical knock out" in the ring. On the streets, it was The Knock Out. The Knockout King.
Eisele and Bambrick decided to visit the teen at home a few blocks away. The teen's mother recognized Eisele. He was the officer who had driven her son home rather than cite him for breaking curfew. That decision seemed to pay off now. The mom called down her son.
Eisele was direct. This is not a social visit, he said. You know why we're here.
The teen was silent.
If you know something, you better tell him, the teen's mom said.
You need to start talking, said another relative.
Finally the teen did.
• • •
Eisele took notes as the teen described what he knew about Quain's attack. He said he was in the Gravois Park gazebo that Friday night when a young girl he knew walked over. Police sirens echoed in the distance. He asked if she knew what was going on. She said she'd watched her friends jump a man on Grand. She figured that's where police were headed.
Eisele got the girl's nickname and her school: Fanning Middle.
The Knockout King also detailed the rules behind the knockout assaults.
He said he got the idea after being bored hitting the bags and sparring at Cherokee. When the gym closed, he and other teens hit the streets. They created a game. The objective was to knock out a stranger with a single punch, get them off their feet. Stealing a wallet or cellphone was not the point. "Do the lick," in Eisele's words, and get on with it.
They called it TKO. There were four main members: the Knockout King was the TKO CEO. He had a co-CEO, a president and an MVP. They hung out in Gravois Park. They flaunted their TKO status on Facebook. They sought out other kids to join their nascent gang. They taught recruits to pick vulnerable, older adults. One rule was that a TKO member had to witness the assault, "kinda like a performance evaluation," Eisele recalls.
But it was impossible to know how many of the knockout incidents could be traced back to TKO. The teen did not take credit for any of them. He told Eisele that, sure, the kids who beat Quain probably were trying to impress him. But, he said, he didn't know it was going to happen.
Notebook closed, Eisele left to find the 13-year-old witness.
• • •
Fanning Middle School sits just behind the Carpenter library. It resembles a Norman Rockwell image of a school, a two-story blonde-brick building with soaring windows. Polished hardwood gleams in the main hallway, just beyond a metal detector and guard.
Eisele found his witness. She looked like a typical 13-year-old. Later that day, with a district detective sitting in, the girl's mother told her daughter to tell police everything.
The girl said that she had been hanging out on Grand with friends from school that Friday. She stood with another girl. Across the street lingered six boys. She said the boys "had hopes of gaining membership with an older group of juveniles who referred to themselves as 'TKO'," according to the police report.
The target was picked at random, an older man just walking past. Two boys, ages 12 and 13, ran up from behind and 'simultaneously punched him on either side of his face," noted the police report. Three other boys — one was 12, the other two were 14 — then began punching and kicking the man, too. The girl's classmate ran across the street and joined in, along with a 14-year-old boy. The victim collapsed. The teens walked away. The girl ended up in Gravois Park, where she ran into the Knockout King.
At the end of the interview, the girl's mom asked about security for her daughter. Eisele and a district detective tried to reassure her. They vowed to not share the girl's name. They hoped somehow that would be enough.
The next day, police returned to Fanning with 12 officers and detectives. "A show of force," Eisele said.
Police arrested four students. A suspended student was picked up later. Two former Fanning students also were taken in.
The teens were taken into juvenile detention. They were charged with second-degree assault. A hearing was set for Jan. 9. That was more than two months away, twice the typical stay before trial. But Judge Jimmie Edwards didn't want the teens on the street.
The same day the Fanning students were arrested, Police Chief Dan Isom announced a "community-based approach" to discourage knockout assaults. The effort began with an assembly at Roosevelt High the next week, then an assembly at Fanning.
Roosevelt made sense to police. The Knockout King was a former student there. Several others believed to be part of TKO still attended. In September, three Roosevelt students had been arrested outside the South Side school, moments after an alleged knockout-style attack on a 73-year-old man.
Isom and Leyshock spoke at the Roosevelt assembly. They were joined by James Clark, from the social services provider Better Family Life. Clark told the students that police can't stop the violence. The mayor can't stop it. James Clark can't stop it. It is going to stop when the students say it stops, he said.
To Leyshock, the students appeared to be taking it all in. Maybe this was working.
Three weeks later, a 54-year-old man was slugged repeatedly in a knockout assault in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Police arrested two Roosevelt students. One of them, 15 years old, told police he'd attended the assembly with the chief and captain.
• • •
As the weeks ticked off, as fall became winter and the holidays passed, the memory of the knockout assaults faded from public view.
But Rodney Smith, a juvenile court investigator, didn't forget. Among his duties that winter was keeping tabs on the sole cooperating witness in the Quain case.
Without that 13-year-old girl, the case would fall apart.
Smith frequently called the girl and her mother. He visited them. The weekend before the court hearing, he took them out to eat at Subway. The girl seemed ready to take the stand.
The trial was set for 9 a.m. on Jan. 9, in the courtroom of Judge Edwards. There are no juries in juvenile court. The judge makes the call.
The seven defendants were eager to get out. They had missed Thanksgiving and Christmas at home. Two of the teens celebrated birthdays in jail.
Early that morning, Smith headed out for one final errand for the case. He drove to north St. Louis to pick up the 13-year-old witness and her mother. They were not home. But family members assured him the pair would get to court on time.
Smith alerted staff attorney Margaret Gangle, who was prosecuting the case. Her key witness was missing. Gangle could have asked for a continuance. But she pressed on.
The courtroom was crowded with the families of the seven defendants. Detective Josh Wenstrom, who had interviewed the young witness, sat nearby in a small room reviewing his notes, preparing to testify. About the same time, far from the scene, the Knockout King posted on Facebook: "FREE ALL MY TKO GUYS."
At 9 a.m. the hearing began.
Minutes later it was over. The 13-year-old witness never showed.
Wenstrom heard a roar in the hallway. It sounded like cheering. "I was almost sick to my stomach," he says.
For Tina Vence, a defendant's mother, it was the right outcome. She was certain her child was innocent. So was Sonia Womack, another defendant's mother. "My heart goes out to him," she said of the victim, "but they need to get the right people that did it."
Edwards dismissed the case. He had no choice. Because the hearing had started, legal jeopardy had attached. The charges could never be brought again.
The defendants flocked to Facebook to announce their freedom. "Yeaaa immm home somebody call mee," one wrote.
"We out here ... who mad," wrote another.
The answer, it turned out, was just about everyone.
• • •
Outrage flowed. Even a court spokesman, limited by the confidentiality of juvenile cases, allowed that this had been "a very frustrating case."
"They have not been tried. I don't understand how this could happen," said Jennifer Florida, a city alderman whose ward included the scenes of several knockout attacks.
The mayor likened the seven defendants to Alyssa Bustamante, the mid-Missouri teen recently convicted of killing her 9-year-old neighbor just for the thrill. "I just can't believe these guys are out there, back on the streets, with no consequences at all," Slay said.
Slay said he believed the 13-year-old witness was intimidated into skipping court. Talk radio and online comments amplified the charge. Leyshock's computer burned up with scathing emails critical of police and the justice system.
Bolstering the notion was a Facebook posting by a defendant's mother on Nov. 17. She wrote that the 13-year-old girl already was missing — "thats a good thing."
Five days after the hearing, the 13-year-old witness took to Facebook to respond to teasing that she had ratted out her friends "because they were playing knock out."
The girl insisted, using online slang, that she was not helping police: "I worked byy myy mff self..."
Authorities tried to find out what really happened. For several weeks, detective Wenstrom and investigator Smith worked to reach the girl's mother. She was never around or didn't return their calls.
In late January, the witness's mother told the Post-Dispatch in a brief interview that her daughter was never missing, but people had been "threatening her."
"We have to live where we stay," she said. "I'm not going to jeopardize my child."
Despite her misgivings, the mother said it was "lies" that they intended to skip court.
Wenstrom didn't blame the young witness. Leyshock was surprised the girl made it as long she did.
• • •
A few weeks after the case collapsed, Leyshock was back in his office, again thinking about the knockout assaults. He moved about the small room as he talked. He had 32 years on the force, had seen a bit of everything, but this was a crime he couldn't comprehend.
"It's outrageous," he said. "And no one can put a finger on it because it's not normal human behavior. It defies norms."
Police know how to deal with burglary, drug-dealing, robbery. Those crimes have motives. Police can turn to the predictive-analysis computers to ferret out patterns. It didn't matter that knockout cases remained relatively rare, maybe eight confirmed cases — a handful more suspected ones — in more than a year in the 24 neighborhoods that make up the Third District. People were scared.
In the Tower Grove area, residents have formed aggressive watch programs to patrol for suspicious behavior. Police have started a database of people they think are involved in knockout assaults. The Knockout King is in there. So are the seven juveniles once accused in the Quain case.
The captain gleefully imagines the teens one day picking the wrong target, maybe an ex-Marine ready to fight back. He said he might even put a decoy on the streets, an undercover officer. In his office, he went back and forth on the idea.
"We're going to try it," he said finally.
He offered up his "Mr. Corny" ideas, such as schools sponsoring "Let's Celebrate Kindness Day" or having teens sign "no violence" pledges.
But, he added, he didn't think this was just a police problem.
"No clergy, no Wash U., no St Louis U. to say, hey, this is some kind of problem, maybe we could go to the schools and maybe do some kind of program?" Leyshock said. "We need some help here."
The city school system said it was open to helping police, but the scrutiny of students at Fanning and Roosevelt "unfairly indicts the schools," said schools spokesman Patrick Wallace. The knockout assaults were "a community issue, not a school issue."
Four months have passed without a knockout assault. But spring is coming. Leyshock worries. It has changed how he sees the streets.
Recently, he was driving on Grand, near where the Knockout King was arrested and not far from Quain's assault, when he saw a group of teenagers on the sidewalk. They were play-fighting. At one time, he would've dismissed it as an innocent game.
Not now. He was taking no chances. He ordered a team of police officers to clear the street.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Post-Dispatch confirmed the identities of the juveniles in the story. They are not named here because juvenile court records are typically not made public, charges were dismissed against some, and others were never charged. This story is based on court records, online posts and more than a dozen interviews.
[(..........My Note: Shortly after this came the outcry against "police brutality" that was shown to be mostly only in cases where abhorrent behavior was exhibited to begin with and force was required. Then came a few incidents where Law Enforcement was being mentally manipulated into abusive behavior on the initial confrontation; that was clear. It is difficult because the officers do rely on their their radios to cmmunicate with police base and that can and was being broken into, but they have found a way around that and are cognizant of the risk they are at because of radio communication (remember that Russia is flying incommunicado for that very reason).... so THIS is where the outcry against police began. It's not the police, but terrorists want us to believe that to take away all the protection society has. Next came the rioting in Ferguson, protests in New York, rioting in Baltimore.... It's terrorist brainwashers causing almost 100% of the problems our society is experiencing. Wake people UP, and don't let anyone get away with ANYTHING no matter WHO they are.......)]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PLANNED? From the top down? It certainly looks like it.... That makes this "game" and series of "incidents" created and driven by Scientology..... It is terrorism.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
St. Louis 'knockout game' case dismissed after witness misses court
January 11, 2012 1:00 pm • By Joel Currier, Jennifer S. Mann
www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/st-louis-knockout-game-case-dismissed-after-witness-misses-court/article_6c93b0d4-3c83-11e1-afe7-0019bb30f31a.html
ST. LOUIS • The prosecution of seven juveniles charged with brutally beating a man for sport collapsed this week when a key witness didn't show for the trial, officials said today.
Seven youths, ages 12 through 14, were accused of attacking Matt Quain, 52, of St. Louis on Oct. 21 as part of the so-called "knockout game," leaving him with a broken jaw, black eye and stitches in his face. All had been charged with second-degree assault.
Prosecutors were at the last minute forced to drop the case when the witness, a 13-year-old girl, didn't show for an adjudication hearing Monday in juvenile court. It is the equivalent of a trial in adult court.
A court spokesman, Matt Murphy, said the witness has refused to cooperate further. He declined to comment further about the witness given that it is a juvenile matter.
Quain said that after the hearing the accused teens gathered in the hallway celebrating the outcome.
"They were cheering and high-fiving," Quain said. "It was like a big game to them."
The teens, who had been held in detention pending the hearing, were released immediately afterward.
The chief trial attorney who handled the case, Margaret Gangle, has not yet been reached for comment. A defense attorney for one accused teen declined comment.
Quain and a neighbor were walking home from a Schnucks store on South Grand Boulevard about 11:40 p.m. on Oct. 21. They were a few blocks from their apartment building when a group of teens surprised them near the Carpenter branch public library.
The attackers walked off as Mayor Francis Slay and his bodyguard, city police Sgt. Blaise Peluso, happened by in their car, spotted the aftermath of the attack and pulled over to help.
Slay said he is "disappointed and angry" about the case being dismissed and takes it personally because he and Peluso were there after the attack.
"I feel for the young girl," Slay said. "I mean, clearly, she was intimidated (into) not testifying. We need to support witnesses like we support victims."
Slay added, "The more we band together and support the victims and not tolerate this kind of stuff as a community, the more these thugs can get put away and be punished the way they deserve."
Quain, who was knocked unconscious in the attack, was unable to identify the teens who assaulted him, nor were any of the people who stopped to help him.
The "knockout game" has been described as random, unprovoked attacks on unsuspecting victims, usually by teens who have no discernable motive other than to play the "game."
Quain told the Post-Dispatch he is disappointed with the outcome of the case but not surprised the witness backed out.
"They got away with it," Quain said. "It's the system we've got. Our case just didn't hold water with the law."
Quain said he is concerned about others becoming victims of the so-called knockout game.
"It's disturbing," he said. "I feel bad for the next unsuspecting victim. I don't doubt that they're gonna do it again."
He said it was difficult seeing his alleged attackers, six boys and a girl, in the courtroom Monday morning.
"They were looking me over like I was a piece of meat," he said.
Quain has worked as a dishwasher for more than seven years at Joanie's Pizza in Soulard. He returned to the shop on a part-time basis two weeks ago and hopes to return full-time as soon as he fully recovers from the attack.
"It's my second family," he said of the restaurant staff.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_behavior
The expression collective behavior was first used by Robert E. Park (1921), and employed later by Herbert Blumer (1939), Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian (1957), and Neil Smelser (1962) to refer to social processes and events which do not reflect existing social structure (laws, conventions, and institutions), but which emerge in a "spontaneous" way. Use of the term has been expanded to include reference to cells, social animals like birds and fish, and insects including ants. Collective behavior takes many forms but generally violates societal norms (Miller 2000, Locher 2002). Collective behavior can be tremendously destructive, as with riots or mob violence, silly, as with fads, or anywhere in between. Collective behavior is always driven by group dynamics, encouraging people to engage in acts they might consider unthinkable under typical social circumstances (Locher 2002).
Defining the field
Turner and Killian (1957) were the first sociologists to back their theoretical propositions with visual evidence in the form of photographs and motion pictures of collective behavior in action. Prior to that sociologists relied heavily upon eyewitness accounts, which turned out to be far less reliable than one would hope.
Turner and Killian's approach is based largely upon the arguments of Blumer, who argued that social "forces" are not really forces. The actor is active: He creates an interpretation of the acts of others, and acts on the basis of this interpretation.
Examples
Here are some instances of collective behavior: the Los Angeles riot of 1992, the hula-hoop fad of 1958, the stock market crashes of 1929, and the "phantom gasser" episodes in Virginia in 1933-34 and Mattoon, IL in 1944 (Locher 2002, Miller 2000). The claim that such diverse episodes all belong to a single field of inquiry is a theoretical assertion, and not all sociologists would agree with it. But Blumer and Neil Smelser did agree, as did others, indicating that the formulation has satisfied some leading sociological thinkers.
Four forms
Although there are several other schema that may be used to classify forms of collective behavior the following four categories from Blumer (1939) are generally considered useful by most sociologists.
The crowd
Scholars differ about what classes of social events fall under the rubric of collective behavior. In fact, the only class of events which all authors include is crowds. Clark McPhail is one of those who treats crowds and collective behavior as synonyms. Although some consider McPhail's work overly simplistic (Locher 2002), his important contribution is to have gone beyond the speculations of others to carry out pioneering empirical studies of crowds. He finds them to form an elaborate set of types.
The classic treatment of crowds is Gustave LeBon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896), in which the author interpreted the crowds of the French Revolution as irrational reversions to animal emotion, and inferred from this that such reversion is characteristic of crowds in general. LeBon believed that crowds somehow induced people to lose their ability to think rationally and to somehow recover this ability once they had left the crowd. He speculated, but could not explain how this might occur. Freud expressed a similar view in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922). Such authors have thought that their ideas were confirmed by various kinds of crowds, one of these being the economic bubble. In Holland, during the tulip mania (1637), the prices of tulip bulbs rose to astronomical heights. An array of such crazes and other historical oddities is narrated in Charles MacKay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841).
At the University of Chicago, Robert Park and Herbert Blumer agreed with the speculations of LeBon and other that crowds are indeed emotional. But to them a crowd is capable of any emotion, not only the negative ones of anger and fear.
A number of authors modify the common-sense notion of the crowd to include episodes during which the participants are not assembled in one place but are dispersed over a large area. Turner and Killian refer to such episodes as diffuse crowds, examples being Billy Graham's revivals, panics about sexual perils, witch hunts and Red scares. Their expanded definition of the crowd is justified if propositions which hold true among compact crowds do so for diffuse crowds as well.
Some psychologists have claimed that there are three fundamental human emotions: fear, joy, and anger. Neil Smelser, John Lofland, and others have proposed three corresponding forms of the crowd: the panic (an expression of fear), the craze (an expression of joy), and the hostile outburst (an expression of anger). Each of the three emotions can characterize either a compact or a diffuse crowd, the result being a scheme of six types of crowds. Lofland has offered the most explicit discussion of these types.
The public
Park distinguishes the crowd, which expresses a common emotion, from a public, which discusses a single issue. Thus, a public is not equivalent to all of the members of a society. Obviously, this is not the usual use of the word, "public." To Park and Blumer, there are as many publics as there are issues. A public comes into being when discussion of an issue begins, and ceases to be when it reaches a decision on it.
The mass
To the crowd and the public Blumer adds a third form of collective behavior, the mass. It differs from both the crowd and the public in that it is defined not by a form of interaction but by the efforts of those who use the mass media to address an audience. The first mass medium was printing.
The social movement
Main article: Social movement
We change intellectual gears when we confront Blumer's final form of collective behavior, the social movement. He identifies several types of these, among which are active social movements such as the French Revolution and expressive ones such as Alcoholics Anonymous. An active movement tries to change society; an expressive one tries to change its own members.
The social movement is the form of collective behavior which satisfies least well the first definition of it which was offered at the beginning of this article. These episodes are less fluid than the other forms, and do not change as often as other forms do. Furthermore, as can be seen in the history of the labor movement and many religious sects, a social movement may begin as collective behavior but over time become firmly established as a social institution.
For this reason, social movements are often considered a separate field of sociology. The books and articles about them are far more numerous than the sum of studies of all the other forms of collective behavior put together. Social movements are considered in many Wikipedia articles, and an article on the field of social movements as a whole would be much longer than this essay.
The study of collective behavior spun its wheels for many years, but began to make progress with the appearance of Turner and Killian's "Collective Behavior" (1957) and Smelser's Theory of Collective Behavior (1962). Both books pushed the topic of collective behavior back into the consciousness of American sociologists and both theories contributed immensely to our understanding of collective behavior (Locher 2002, Miller 2000). Social disturbances in the U. S. and elsewhere in the late '60s and early '70s inspired another surge of interest in crowds and social movements. These studies presented a number of challenges to the armchair sociology of earlier students of collective behavior.
Theories developed to explain crowd behavior
Social scientists have developed theories to explain crowd behavior.
1. Contagion Theory - the Contagion Theory was formulated by Gustave Le Bon. According to Le Bon crowds exert a hypnotic influence over their members. Shielded by their anonymity, large numbers of people abandon personal responsibility and surrender to the contagious emotions of the crowd. A crowd thus assumes a life of its own, stirring up emotions and driving people toward irrational, even violent action (LeBon 1895). Le Bon's Theory, although one of the earliest explanations of crowd behavior, is still accepted by many people outside of sociology. However, critics argue that the "collective mind" has not been documented by systematic studies. Furthermore, although collective behavior may involve strong emotions, such feelings are not necessarily irrational. Turner and Killian (1957) argue convincingly that the "contagion" never actually occurs and participants in collective behavior do not lose their ability to think rationally.
2. Convergence Theory - whereas the Contagion Theory states that crowds cause people to act in a certain way, Convergence theory states that people who want to act in a certain way come together to form crowds. Developed by Floyd Allport (1924) and later expanded upon by Neil Miller and John Dollard (1941) as "Learning Theory," the central argument of all convergence theories is that collective behavior reveals the otherwise hidden tendencies of the individuals who take part in the episode. It asserts that people with similar attributes find other like-minded persons with whom they can release these underlying tendencies. People sometimes do things in a crowd that they would not have the courage to do alone because crowds can diffuse responsibility but the behavior itself is claimed to originate within the individuals. Crowds, in addition, can intensify a sentiment simply by creating a critical mass of like-minded people.
3. Emergent-Norm Theory - according to Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian (1957), crowds begin as collectivities composed of people with mixed interests and motives. Especially in the case of less stable crowds—expressive, acting and protest crowds—norms may be vague and changing, as when one person decides to break the glass windows of a store and others join in and begin looting merchandise. When people find themselves in a situation that is vague, ambiguous, or confusing new norms "emerge" on the spot and people follow those emergent norms, which may be at odds with normal social behavior. Turner and Killian further argue that there are several different categories of participants, all of whom follow different patterns of behavior due to their differing motivations.
4. Value-added Theory - Neil Smelser (1962) argues that collective behavior is actually a sort of release valve for built-up tension ("strain") within the social system, community, or group. If the proper determinants are present then collective behavior becomes inevitable. Conversely, if any of the key determinants are not present no collective behavior will occur unless and until the missing determinants fall into place. These are primarily social, although physical factors such as location and weather may also contribute to or hinder the development of collective behavior.
5. Complex Adaptive Systems theory - Dutch scholar Jaap van Ginneken claims that contagion, convergence and emergent norms are just instances of the synergy, emergence and autopoiesis or self-creation of patterns and new entities typical for the newly discovered meta-category of complex adaptive systems. This also helps explain the key role of salient details and path-dependence in rapid shifts.
See also:
Bandwagon effect
Collective consciousness
Collective effervescence
Collective intelligence
Collective hysteria
Collective narcissism
Complex adaptive systems
Crowd manipulation
Crowd psychology
Systems science
Bioengineering
Penis panic
Peer pressure
Social comparison theory
Spiral of silence
Herd behavior
Group behavior
Herd morality
Sheeple
Keeping up with the Joneses
Theories of political behavior
Moral panic
Bibliography:
Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841.
Herbert Blumer, "Collective Behavior," in A. M. Lee, ed., Principles of Sociology, New York, Barnes & Noble, 1951, pp. 67–121.
Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1962.
Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M. Killian, Collective Behavior, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice-Hall, 1957 1st ed., 2d ed., 1972; 3d. ed. 1987; 4th ed. 1993.
Kurt Lang and Gladys Lang, Collective Dynamics
John Lofland, Protest...
James B. Rule, Theories of Civil Violence, Berkeley, University of California, 1988.
Clark McPhail, The Myth of the Madding Crowd, New York, Aldine de Gruyter, 1991.
Basco Michael, Socio Anthropology " Mendiola Manila.
Jaap van Ginneken, Collective behavior and public opinion – Rapid shifts in opinion and communication, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003.
Giovanni Naldi, Lorenzo Pareschi, Giuseppe Toscani, Mathematical modelling of collective behavior in socio-economic and life sciences, Birkhauser, (2010).
Locher, David A., Collective Behavior, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.
Miller, David L., Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2000 2d ed., 1985.
Park, Robert E and Ernest W. Burgess. 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Allport, Floyd. 1924. Social Psychology. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, The Riverside Press.
Miller, Neil and John Dollard. 1941. Social Learning and Imitation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
LeBon, Gustave. 1895. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Atlanta: Cherokee Publishing Company.
External links:
Group Experiment Environments (GEE) project, sponsored by the Percepts and Concepts Laboratory at Indiana University
References:
> Gordon, Deborah M. (11 March 2014). "The Ecology of Collective Behavior". PLoS Biol 12 (3). doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001805. Retrieved 28 March 2014.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[(.......When the good people refuse to use this, the bad people rule and school. Be the first to do good and give the bad no room to wiggle without banning them. If you ban them, they only work their evil undetected, they are the ones that observe no rules. In the case of Collective Behavior, it is another thing to watch out for. In the past we called this "mob rule" and it is often hijacked into evil actions used against humanity. Flash mobs started out evil and was turned into good by meeting to sing or collective dances. Don't let them start to begin with is a better option: another "fad" was the social media triggered "Knockout Game" that sent kids out to knock down/punch the unsuspecting elderly on the street which was Horrific abuse against humanity, yet kids still did it... allow NO Excuses, not "no fear". Fear Protects Us All; it should not be erased as our societial morals, values and norms have been assaulted. Choose social movement, not collective behavior.
It's odd how at this point I'm remembering GP's "Conscious Uncoupling from that singer....)]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Herd behavior
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_behavior
Herd behavior describes how individuals in a group can act collectively without centralized direction. The term can refer to the behavior of animals in herds, packs, bird flocks, fish schools and so on, as well as the behavior of humans in demonstrations, riots and general strikes, sporting events, religious gatherings, episodes of mob violence and everyday decision-making, judgement and opinion-forming.
Raafat, Chater and Frith proposed an integrated approach to herding, describing two key issues, the mechanisms of transmission of thoughts or behavior between individuals and the patterns of connections between them. They suggested that bringing together diverse theoretical approaches of herding behavior illuminates the applicability of the concept to many domains, ranging from cognitive neuroscience to economics.
In Animals:
A group of animals fleeing from a predator shows the nature of herd behavior. In 1971, in the oft cited article "Geometry For The Selfish Herd," evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton asserted that each individual group member reduces the danger to itself by moving as close as possible to the center of the fleeing group. Thus the herd appears as a unit in moving together, but its function emerges from the uncoordinated behavior of self-serving individuals.
Symmetry-breaking:
Asymmetric aggregation of animals under panic conditions has been observed in many species, including humans, mice, and ants. Theoretical models have demonstrated symmetry-breaking similar to observations in empirical studies. For example, when panicked individuals are confined to a room with two equal and equidistant exits, a majority will favor one exit while the minority will favor the other.
Possible mechanisms for this behavior include Hamilton’s selfish herd theory, neighbor copying, or the byproduct of communication by social animals or runaway positive feedback.
Characteristics of escape panic include:
- Individuals attempt to move faster than normal.
- Interactions between individuals become physical.
- Exits become arched and clogged.
- Escape is slowed by fallen individuals serving as obstacles.
- Individuals display a tendency towards mass or copied behavior.
- Alternative or less used exits are overlooked.
[(......DO NOT let this happen! It is what terrorists try to instigate when instigating events in stadiums and theaters. ALWAYS stay calm, cool, and collected. Always, without exception. .....)]
In human societies:
The philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were among the first to criticize what they referred to as "the crowd" (Kierkegaard) and "herd morality" and the "herd instinct" (Nietzsche) in human society. Modern psychological and economic research has identified herd behavior in humans to explain the phenomena of large numbers of people acting in the same way at the same time. The British surgeon Wilfred Trotter popularized the "herd behavior" phrase in his book, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1914). In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen explained economic behavior in terms of social influences such as "emulation," where some members of a group mimic other members of higher status. In "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903), early sociologist George Simmel referred to the "impulse to sociability in man", and sought to describe "the forms of association by which a mere sum of separate individuals are made into a 'society' ". Other social scientists explored behaviors related to herding, such as Freud (crowd psychology), Carl Jung (collective unconscious), and Gustave Le Bon (the popular mind). Swarm theory observed in non-human societies is a related concept and is being explored as it occurs in human society.
Stock market bubbles:
Large stock market trends often begin and end with periods of frenzied buying (bubbles) or selling (crashes). Many observers cite these episodes as clear examples of herding behavior that is irrational and driven by emotion—greed in the bubbles, fear in the crashes. Individual investors join the crowd of others in a rush to get in or out of the market.
Some followers of the technical analysis school of investing see the herding behavior of investors as an example of extreme market sentiment. The academic study of behavioral finance has identified herding in the collective irrationality of investors, particularly the work of Nobel laureates Vernon L. Smith, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, and Robert Shiller.
Hey and Morone (2004) analyzed a model of herd behavior in a market context. Their work is related to at least two important strands of literature. The first of these strands is that on herd behavior in a non-market context. The seminal references are Banerjee (1992) and Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and Welch (1992), both of which showed that herd behavior may result from private information not publicly shared. More specifically, both of these papers showed that individuals, acting sequentially on the basis of private information and public knowledge about the behavior of others, may end up choosing the socially undesirable option. The second of the strands of literature motivating this paper is that of information aggregation in market contexts. A very early reference is the classic paper by Grossman and Stiglitz (1976) that showed that uninformed traders in a market context can become informed through the price in such a way that private information is aggregated correctly and efficiently. In this strand of the literature, the most commonly used empirical methodologies to test for herding toward the average, are the works of Christie and Huang (1995) and Chang, Cheng and Khorana (2000). Overall, it was shown that it is possible to observe herd-type behavior in a market context. The results refer to a market with a well-defined fundamental value. Even if herd behavior might only be observed rarely, this has important consequences for a whole range of real markets – most particularly foreign exchange markets.
One such herdish incident was the price volatility that surrounded the 2007 Uranium bubble, which started with flooding of the Cigar Lake Mine in Saskatchewan, during the year 2006.
In crowds
Main article: Crowd psychology
Crowds that gather on behalf of a grievance can involve herding behavior that turns violent, particularly when confronted by an opposing ethnic or racial group. The Los Angeles riots of 1992, New York Draft Riots and Tulsa Race Riot are notorious in U.S. history. The idea of a "group mind" or "mob behavior" was put forward by the French social psychologists Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon.
Everyday decision-making
"Benign" herding behaviors may occur frequently in everyday decisions based on learning from the information of others, as when a person on the street decides which of two restaurants to dine in. Suppose that both look appealing, but both are empty because it is early evening; so at random, this person chooses restaurant A. Soon a couple walks down the same street in search of a place to eat. They see that restaurant A has customers while B is empty, and choose A on the assumption that having customers makes it the better choice. Because other passersby do the same thing into the evening, restaurant A does more business that night than B. This phenomenon is also referred as an information cascade.
See also:
Bandwagon effect
Collective behavior
Collective consciousness
Collective effervescence
Collective intelligence
Crowd psychology
Conformity
Group behavior
Groupthink
Herd mentality
Hive mind
Informational cascade
Mass hysteria
Mean world syndrome
Meme
Mob rule
Moral panic
Propaganda
Self-organization
Sheeple
Social proof
Socionomics
Spontaneous order
Swarm intelligence
Team player
The 2009 Birmingham, Millennium Point stampede
Riot
Stampede
Symmetry breaking of escaping ants
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[(........I had not realized just how long we've been combatting terrorism inmass society. Here is an example of mentally manipulated incidents that were happening in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, all the major (and some minor) cities across the nation. It is from 2011; and they were incidents from kids of all backgrounds and nationalities. Bad behavior is terrorism no matter who is doing it, and we must work together to stop it. It is FAR easier to work on combatting this stuff by all working together in Unity. Thank you so much for helping to make all our lives better!! <3....)]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
'Knockout game' case shocked St. Louis, then fell apart
www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/knockout-game-case-shocked-st-louis-then-fell-apart/article_cdf5032a-b65e-51e0-a84e-de0f0ce0c5f8.html
March 04, 2012 10:15 am • BY TODD C. FRANKEL
ST. LOUIS • The police captain couldn't believe it. He had the Knockout King in his office.
It was September 2011, and police were struggling to get a handle on a series of vicious knockout assaults in south St. Louis. Groups of teens were cold-cocking older pedestrians at random. One was dead, several injured. Residents were alarmed, police baffled. It didn't make sense, such a cruel and cowardly crime.
Now, sitting in Capt. Jerry Leyshock's office was an important key to the mystery: the Knockout King. That was the teen's nickname, said the four other young men also swept up that night by police after yet another assault. They sat inside South Patrol headquarters. And the ringleader, they said, happened to be right over there.
Leyshock took stock of the young man in his office. The kid looked 17 or 18. He was stocky, his hair cut in short dreadlocks. He wore a hooded sweatshirt. The captain, who coached youth boxing, thought he recognized the teen as a boxer from the Cherokee Recreation Center. The teen, for now, revealed little. Then he mentioned he was 16, a juvenile. Too young to talk with police alone. The interview was over.
In a moment, the teens would be released. But first, Leyshock, in his white dress shirt and black tie, gold badge on his chest, leaned in close.
"I think it's a safe bet we're going to pay you a visit whenever a knockout case comes up," the captain said.
The meeting with the Knockout King would turn out to be a crucial break in a crime that hadn't occurred yet — a case of cavalier brutality that would shock a city, especially after the accused attackers were set free.
On Oct. 21, Matt Quain, 52, a dishwasher, was severely beaten in a knockout assault on South Grand Boulevard. The mayor helped rescue him. Seven middle schoolers, some as young as 12, were arrested. Then, at a juvenile court hearing in January, the main witness, a 13-year-old classmate of the defendants, failed to show up. The case was tossed out.
The kids celebrated. Others howled.
"People all over the city of St. Louis are outraged over this," Mayor Francis Slay said.
The case seemed to captivate the city with a series of difficult questions: Why was this happening? How would it stop? Was witness intimidation a factor?
The story of how police cracked the case, only to see it fall apart, shows the unusual challenges posed by knockout assaults, as well as the communitywide frustrations. The crimes were rare, but terrorizing. These were not muggings. Something else was at play here. It was a matter of finding out what, even if the answers were unsettling.
• • •
The summer of 2011 had started quietly enough, with no hint that knockout assaults would be a problem in the fall.
This was a surprise. In April, four teens had attacked a 72-year-old Vietnamese immigrant and his wife as they walked home from a market in Dutchtown. Hoang Nguyen died. His wife was hurt. An 18-year-old man, who allegedly told police he just wanted to knock someone out, was charged with first-degree murder.
"Knockout game" became the crime's coarse moniker. But it didn't feel like the start of something new. No one saw it as the sign of a wave of random assaults. After all, violent crime rates were falling across the city.
Then, in late August, several bicyclists were jumped in the Shaw neighborhood. In September, a group of teens pummeled a 59-year-old man as he walked near Grand and Gravois Road. Police rounded up the Knockout King and the other teens. But the pedestrian said he never got a good look at his attackers.
And once again, the knockout attacks seemed to fade away. Until October 21.
It was a cool autumn night, a Friday. Quain and neighbor Jon Kelly watched a Blues game on TV and then walked to a nearby Schnucks to buy some beer. On the way back, the pair walked by the Carpenter city library in the 3300 block of Grand. They could see, just ahead, the bright lights of the South Grand business district. Home was two blocks away.
At the same time, Mayor Slay was returning from a Pink Floyd tribute show at the Fox Theatre. His bodyguard, Sgt. Blaise Peluso, was at the wheel. As they neared the library, Slay looked out the window. He saw a group of kids crowding the sidewalk.
That doesn't look right, he told Peluso.
The group walked in front of the mayor's car, across Grand. Slay noted how relaxed they looked. He glanced back at the library. He saw a man facedown in the street, motionless, feet inches from the curb, blood pooling on the pavement.
Slay thought the man had been shot. Peluso pulled over. The teens kept walking, unhurried, on the other side of the street now, past an idling car. The car's driver had stopped when he saw Quain fall to the pavement. He heard the impact's "thump" even with his windows rolled up. The 49-year-old city resident watched the teens cross behind him. They looked like little kids, he thought. They laughed and held aloft cellphones like they were snapping pictures.
The teens disappeared from view.
• • •
Quain suffered a broken jaw. The incident seemed like an echo of the fatal assault in April. And the mayor's role made the incident loom only larger. This was suddenly a high-profile case.
And police were struggling with it. At least nine officers had descended on the scene that Friday night, hoping to turn up a lead. Nothing. The teens were gone. The witnesses couldn't identify anyone. Police had little to go on. The case threatened to slip away.
Leyshock decided it was time to visit the Knockout King.
"I wanted to see how he played me, feel him out," the captain said.
He stopped by the Cherokee rec center in Benton Park. The captain knew the boxing coach there, Jesse Davison.
Davison ran a tight program. He told his young boxers to stay out of trouble so often they called him the Preacher Man. "Use your fists in the ring, not on the street," he liked to tell them.
Some of his boxers had made the Olympic trials. But Davison tried to keep even the troublemakers coming around. At least then he could influence them. When the captain showed up, Davison suspected which boxer he wanted to see. The teen had long been a challenge. A couple years ago, the teen's mother had brought the kid to the gym asking for help with her out-of-control son. "He's a good kid," the boxing coach says, "but he's just going down the wrong path."
The boxing gym sits on the second floor, centered on a worn-out blue Budweiser boxing mat. The Knockout King was throwing punches at a heavy bag. Leyshock sat down on a red weight bench. He called the teen over.
You know why I'm here, the captain said.
It wasn't me or my crew, the teen replied.
Leyshock couldn't press him. It was too early in the investigation, but he'd made a point. Police would be back.
It took just one more day. At South Patrol's 10 a.m. roll call, a sergeant read aloud an update of recent crimes and concerns. The Quain incident was mentioned. Officer Brian Eisele perked up.
Eisele was 29. He was built like a college wrestler, short but muscular. He'd been on the force three years. As a patrolman, he knew about the knockout assaults. He was familiar with the area where Quain was assaulted. A middle school was nearby. So was Gravois Park. And Eisele knew that one teen's name kept coming up: the Knockout King.
Eisele wasn't a detective, but he decided to chase this case between radio calls. When roll call ended, he grabbed his partner, rookie patrolman Kevin Bambrick.
They started at Gravois Park, not far from where Quain was attacked. The patrolmen walked to a large gazebo in the center. Gang activity was a problem here. Police regularly chased off people who lingered past the small city park's 10 p.m. curfew. At least twice Eisele had taken the Knockout King home after curfew violations. Eisele spotted graffiti on the gazebo. One phrase stood out: "TKO zone Stay Out."
TKO. It means "technical knock out" in the ring. On the streets, it was The Knock Out. The Knockout King.
Eisele and Bambrick decided to visit the teen at home a few blocks away. The teen's mother recognized Eisele. He was the officer who had driven her son home rather than cite him for breaking curfew. That decision seemed to pay off now. The mom called down her son.
Eisele was direct. This is not a social visit, he said. You know why we're here.
The teen was silent.
If you know something, you better tell him, the teen's mom said.
You need to start talking, said another relative.
Finally the teen did.
• • •
Eisele took notes as the teen described what he knew about Quain's attack. He said he was in the Gravois Park gazebo that Friday night when a young girl he knew walked over. Police sirens echoed in the distance. He asked if she knew what was going on. She said she'd watched her friends jump a man on Grand. She figured that's where police were headed.
Eisele got the girl's nickname and her school: Fanning Middle.
The Knockout King also detailed the rules behind the knockout assaults.
He said he got the idea after being bored hitting the bags and sparring at Cherokee. When the gym closed, he and other teens hit the streets. They created a game. The objective was to knock out a stranger with a single punch, get them off their feet. Stealing a wallet or cellphone was not the point. "Do the lick," in Eisele's words, and get on with it.
They called it TKO. There were four main members: the Knockout King was the TKO CEO. He had a co-CEO, a president and an MVP. They hung out in Gravois Park. They flaunted their TKO status on Facebook. They sought out other kids to join their nascent gang. They taught recruits to pick vulnerable, older adults. One rule was that a TKO member had to witness the assault, "kinda like a performance evaluation," Eisele recalls.
But it was impossible to know how many of the knockout incidents could be traced back to TKO. The teen did not take credit for any of them. He told Eisele that, sure, the kids who beat Quain probably were trying to impress him. But, he said, he didn't know it was going to happen.
Notebook closed, Eisele left to find the 13-year-old witness.
• • •
Fanning Middle School sits just behind the Carpenter library. It resembles a Norman Rockwell image of a school, a two-story blonde-brick building with soaring windows. Polished hardwood gleams in the main hallway, just beyond a metal detector and guard.
Eisele found his witness. She looked like a typical 13-year-old. Later that day, with a district detective sitting in, the girl's mother told her daughter to tell police everything.
The girl said that she had been hanging out on Grand with friends from school that Friday. She stood with another girl. Across the street lingered six boys. She said the boys "had hopes of gaining membership with an older group of juveniles who referred to themselves as 'TKO'," according to the police report.
The target was picked at random, an older man just walking past. Two boys, ages 12 and 13, ran up from behind and 'simultaneously punched him on either side of his face," noted the police report. Three other boys — one was 12, the other two were 14 — then began punching and kicking the man, too. The girl's classmate ran across the street and joined in, along with a 14-year-old boy. The victim collapsed. The teens walked away. The girl ended up in Gravois Park, where she ran into the Knockout King.
At the end of the interview, the girl's mom asked about security for her daughter. Eisele and a district detective tried to reassure her. They vowed to not share the girl's name. They hoped somehow that would be enough.
The next day, police returned to Fanning with 12 officers and detectives. "A show of force," Eisele said.
Police arrested four students. A suspended student was picked up later. Two former Fanning students also were taken in.
The teens were taken into juvenile detention. They were charged with second-degree assault. A hearing was set for Jan. 9. That was more than two months away, twice the typical stay before trial. But Judge Jimmie Edwards didn't want the teens on the street.
The same day the Fanning students were arrested, Police Chief Dan Isom announced a "community-based approach" to discourage knockout assaults. The effort began with an assembly at Roosevelt High the next week, then an assembly at Fanning.
Roosevelt made sense to police. The Knockout King was a former student there. Several others believed to be part of TKO still attended. In September, three Roosevelt students had been arrested outside the South Side school, moments after an alleged knockout-style attack on a 73-year-old man.
Isom and Leyshock spoke at the Roosevelt assembly. They were joined by James Clark, from the social services provider Better Family Life. Clark told the students that police can't stop the violence. The mayor can't stop it. James Clark can't stop it. It is going to stop when the students say it stops, he said.
To Leyshock, the students appeared to be taking it all in. Maybe this was working.
Three weeks later, a 54-year-old man was slugged repeatedly in a knockout assault in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Police arrested two Roosevelt students. One of them, 15 years old, told police he'd attended the assembly with the chief and captain.
• • •
As the weeks ticked off, as fall became winter and the holidays passed, the memory of the knockout assaults faded from public view.
But Rodney Smith, a juvenile court investigator, didn't forget. Among his duties that winter was keeping tabs on the sole cooperating witness in the Quain case.
Without that 13-year-old girl, the case would fall apart.
Smith frequently called the girl and her mother. He visited them. The weekend before the court hearing, he took them out to eat at Subway. The girl seemed ready to take the stand.
The trial was set for 9 a.m. on Jan. 9, in the courtroom of Judge Edwards. There are no juries in juvenile court. The judge makes the call.
The seven defendants were eager to get out. They had missed Thanksgiving and Christmas at home. Two of the teens celebrated birthdays in jail.
Early that morning, Smith headed out for one final errand for the case. He drove to north St. Louis to pick up the 13-year-old witness and her mother. They were not home. But family members assured him the pair would get to court on time.
Smith alerted staff attorney Margaret Gangle, who was prosecuting the case. Her key witness was missing. Gangle could have asked for a continuance. But she pressed on.
The courtroom was crowded with the families of the seven defendants. Detective Josh Wenstrom, who had interviewed the young witness, sat nearby in a small room reviewing his notes, preparing to testify. About the same time, far from the scene, the Knockout King posted on Facebook: "FREE ALL MY TKO GUYS."
At 9 a.m. the hearing began.
Minutes later it was over. The 13-year-old witness never showed.
Wenstrom heard a roar in the hallway. It sounded like cheering. "I was almost sick to my stomach," he says.
For Tina Vence, a defendant's mother, it was the right outcome. She was certain her child was innocent. So was Sonia Womack, another defendant's mother. "My heart goes out to him," she said of the victim, "but they need to get the right people that did it."
Edwards dismissed the case. He had no choice. Because the hearing had started, legal jeopardy had attached. The charges could never be brought again.
The defendants flocked to Facebook to announce their freedom. "Yeaaa immm home somebody call mee," one wrote.
"We out here ... who mad," wrote another.
The answer, it turned out, was just about everyone.
• • •
Outrage flowed. Even a court spokesman, limited by the confidentiality of juvenile cases, allowed that this had been "a very frustrating case."
"They have not been tried. I don't understand how this could happen," said Jennifer Florida, a city alderman whose ward included the scenes of several knockout attacks.
The mayor likened the seven defendants to Alyssa Bustamante, the mid-Missouri teen recently convicted of killing her 9-year-old neighbor just for the thrill. "I just can't believe these guys are out there, back on the streets, with no consequences at all," Slay said.
Slay said he believed the 13-year-old witness was intimidated into skipping court. Talk radio and online comments amplified the charge. Leyshock's computer burned up with scathing emails critical of police and the justice system.
Bolstering the notion was a Facebook posting by a defendant's mother on Nov. 17. She wrote that the 13-year-old girl already was missing — "thats a good thing."
Five days after the hearing, the 13-year-old witness took to Facebook to respond to teasing that she had ratted out her friends "because they were playing knock out."
The girl insisted, using online slang, that she was not helping police: "I worked byy myy mff self..."
Authorities tried to find out what really happened. For several weeks, detective Wenstrom and investigator Smith worked to reach the girl's mother. She was never around or didn't return their calls.
In late January, the witness's mother told the Post-Dispatch in a brief interview that her daughter was never missing, but people had been "threatening her."
"We have to live where we stay," she said. "I'm not going to jeopardize my child."
Despite her misgivings, the mother said it was "lies" that they intended to skip court.
Wenstrom didn't blame the young witness. Leyshock was surprised the girl made it as long she did.
• • •
A few weeks after the case collapsed, Leyshock was back in his office, again thinking about the knockout assaults. He moved about the small room as he talked. He had 32 years on the force, had seen a bit of everything, but this was a crime he couldn't comprehend.
"It's outrageous," he said. "And no one can put a finger on it because it's not normal human behavior. It defies norms."
Police know how to deal with burglary, drug-dealing, robbery. Those crimes have motives. Police can turn to the predictive-analysis computers to ferret out patterns. It didn't matter that knockout cases remained relatively rare, maybe eight confirmed cases — a handful more suspected ones — in more than a year in the 24 neighborhoods that make up the Third District. People were scared.
In the Tower Grove area, residents have formed aggressive watch programs to patrol for suspicious behavior. Police have started a database of people they think are involved in knockout assaults. The Knockout King is in there. So are the seven juveniles once accused in the Quain case.
The captain gleefully imagines the teens one day picking the wrong target, maybe an ex-Marine ready to fight back. He said he might even put a decoy on the streets, an undercover officer. In his office, he went back and forth on the idea.
"We're going to try it," he said finally.
He offered up his "Mr. Corny" ideas, such as schools sponsoring "Let's Celebrate Kindness Day" or having teens sign "no violence" pledges.
But, he added, he didn't think this was just a police problem.
"No clergy, no Wash U., no St Louis U. to say, hey, this is some kind of problem, maybe we could go to the schools and maybe do some kind of program?" Leyshock said. "We need some help here."
The city school system said it was open to helping police, but the scrutiny of students at Fanning and Roosevelt "unfairly indicts the schools," said schools spokesman Patrick Wallace. The knockout assaults were "a community issue, not a school issue."
Four months have passed without a knockout assault. But spring is coming. Leyshock worries. It has changed how he sees the streets.
Recently, he was driving on Grand, near where the Knockout King was arrested and not far from Quain's assault, when he saw a group of teenagers on the sidewalk. They were play-fighting. At one time, he would've dismissed it as an innocent game.
Not now. He was taking no chances. He ordered a team of police officers to clear the street.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Post-Dispatch confirmed the identities of the juveniles in the story. They are not named here because juvenile court records are typically not made public, charges were dismissed against some, and others were never charged. This story is based on court records, online posts and more than a dozen interviews.
[(..........My Note: Shortly after this came the outcry against "police brutality" that was shown to be mostly only in cases where abhorrent behavior was exhibited to begin with and force was required. Then came a few incidents where Law Enforcement was being mentally manipulated into abusive behavior on the initial confrontation; that was clear. It is difficult because the officers do rely on their their radios to cmmunicate with police base and that can and was being broken into, but they have found a way around that and are cognizant of the risk they are at because of radio communication (remember that Russia is flying incommunicado for that very reason).... so THIS is where the outcry against police began. It's not the police, but terrorists want us to believe that to take away all the protection society has. Next came the rioting in Ferguson, protests in New York, rioting in Baltimore.... It's terrorist brainwashers causing almost 100% of the problems our society is experiencing. Wake people UP, and don't let anyone get away with ANYTHING no matter WHO they are.......)]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PLANNED? From the top down? It certainly looks like it.... That makes this "game" and series of "incidents" created and driven by Scientology..... It is terrorism.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
St. Louis 'knockout game' case dismissed after witness misses court
January 11, 2012 1:00 pm • By Joel Currier, Jennifer S. Mann
www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/st-louis-knockout-game-case-dismissed-after-witness-misses-court/article_6c93b0d4-3c83-11e1-afe7-0019bb30f31a.html
ST. LOUIS • The prosecution of seven juveniles charged with brutally beating a man for sport collapsed this week when a key witness didn't show for the trial, officials said today.
Seven youths, ages 12 through 14, were accused of attacking Matt Quain, 52, of St. Louis on Oct. 21 as part of the so-called "knockout game," leaving him with a broken jaw, black eye and stitches in his face. All had been charged with second-degree assault.
Prosecutors were at the last minute forced to drop the case when the witness, a 13-year-old girl, didn't show for an adjudication hearing Monday in juvenile court. It is the equivalent of a trial in adult court.
A court spokesman, Matt Murphy, said the witness has refused to cooperate further. He declined to comment further about the witness given that it is a juvenile matter.
Quain said that after the hearing the accused teens gathered in the hallway celebrating the outcome.
"They were cheering and high-fiving," Quain said. "It was like a big game to them."
The teens, who had been held in detention pending the hearing, were released immediately afterward.
The chief trial attorney who handled the case, Margaret Gangle, has not yet been reached for comment. A defense attorney for one accused teen declined comment.
Quain and a neighbor were walking home from a Schnucks store on South Grand Boulevard about 11:40 p.m. on Oct. 21. They were a few blocks from their apartment building when a group of teens surprised them near the Carpenter branch public library.
The attackers walked off as Mayor Francis Slay and his bodyguard, city police Sgt. Blaise Peluso, happened by in their car, spotted the aftermath of the attack and pulled over to help.
Slay said he is "disappointed and angry" about the case being dismissed and takes it personally because he and Peluso were there after the attack.
"I feel for the young girl," Slay said. "I mean, clearly, she was intimidated (into) not testifying. We need to support witnesses like we support victims."
Slay added, "The more we band together and support the victims and not tolerate this kind of stuff as a community, the more these thugs can get put away and be punished the way they deserve."
Quain, who was knocked unconscious in the attack, was unable to identify the teens who assaulted him, nor were any of the people who stopped to help him.
The "knockout game" has been described as random, unprovoked attacks on unsuspecting victims, usually by teens who have no discernable motive other than to play the "game."
Quain told the Post-Dispatch he is disappointed with the outcome of the case but not surprised the witness backed out.
"They got away with it," Quain said. "It's the system we've got. Our case just didn't hold water with the law."
Quain said he is concerned about others becoming victims of the so-called knockout game.
"It's disturbing," he said. "I feel bad for the next unsuspecting victim. I don't doubt that they're gonna do it again."
He said it was difficult seeing his alleged attackers, six boys and a girl, in the courtroom Monday morning.
"They were looking me over like I was a piece of meat," he said.
Quain has worked as a dishwasher for more than seven years at Joanie's Pizza in Soulard. He returned to the shop on a part-time basis two weeks ago and hopes to return full-time as soon as he fully recovers from the attack.
"It's my second family," he said of the restaurant staff.