Ah, Brave New World is upon us, with proposals to use computerized, Silicon Valley, and Defense Department methods to stop shooters and related violence. The proposed savior would be a new Federal Agency, called HARPA.  The Washington Post article cites the proposal called: “SAFEHOME for Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes — which calls for exploring whether technology like phones and smartwatches can be used to detect when mentally ill people are about to turn violent.”

This proposal feels like Ground Hog Day on LSD to me. Why? Because the United States already has incredibly good science to prevent violence, but we are not using that science. You will be surprised what that science might be, and much of it dates back to the 1990s.  Virtually all of that science is accessible on pubmed.gov or PsychInfo. And, yes, our leaders might have to read sophisticated medical and behavioral science—instead of being dazzled by bright and shiny objects from Silicon Valley.

The gushing notion from the White House is that smartphones and watches might predict mentally ill people who are going ballistically violent. This might be good for Silicon Valley, but crappy science. Consider good science.

First, mental illness—per se—does not predict violence [1]. Here is a chart of such risk, which I have colorized for clarity.  You can see that there is a tiny difference in violence rates between people with no mental illness and those with just severe mental illness, but a bit more violence among people with addictions.

Second, the history of severe mental illness and substance abuse do not predict violence very well. A history of violence does, which is something well documented in behavioral science that goes half a century of behavioral science, a little before I wrote my senior honors paper on the subject at the University of Kansas.  

Third, if you want to predict to murder (e.g., homicide, we call it in science), you can find some inconvenient predictors related to large political campaign donors: a) airborne lead levels in the 3,011 counties in the lower 48 states [2]; b) omega-6 largely from soybean and corn oil in our diets and the school lunch program versus omega-3 (fish) consumption [3, 4].  Lead is well documented to cause reduced IQ, behavior problems, and aggression; yet sadly lead does not decay; and airborne lead levels measured by the EPA in lower 48 states (3,011 counties) predict both homicide and crime [2, 5]. 

Related to the combination of substance abuse plus violence, exposure to lead (Pb) modifies the brain to more likely to be addicted to alcohol [6].  Alcohol consumption and the risk of increased violence are exceptionally well documented in science [7-9], something I witnessed directly between my parents. High availability of “off-premises” alcohol has a significant impact on being shot; heavy drinkers were 2.67 times as likely to be shot in an assault when compared with nondrinker.

Fourth, there is a cultural, social aspect of homicides, too. Most people are unlikely to know the research about it, which is called the Culture of Honor [10-16].  In cultures where wealth is “portable” (e.g., herds of sheep or cows, gold, cash, precious jewels, drugs) versus fixed assets (e.g., not easily moved, such as a farm that requires considerable labor), violence and homicide are much higher. Famously, this was first elegantly studied by Nisbett and colleagues, showing that the descendants of such folks in the South are more likely to kill others as a matter of “honor.” As it happens, people from such cultures did differentially migrate to places in America, and the rates of gun homicide rates in those states are higher, as shown by the CDC map.

The examples in my essay are a fraction of known preventable causes of violent crime and homicides. In the 1990s, I had one of the handfuls of randomized-control studies to reduce youth violence in schools—funded by the Centers for Disease Control. My project, called, PeaceBuidlers, was the first randomized trial of whole school behavioral supports in the United States [17].  The CDC sent an EPI team to investigate an “outbreak of peace” in the research schools, and the EPI-team published the first medically-coded reduction in violent injuries in school [18]. The study was front-page news in Tucson, and almost any school in America can replicate the strategy that involved massive, written peer-to-peer reinforcement of positive behavior. We have a similar finding from our Good Behavior Game research [19], showing that peer-to-peer reinforcement for prosocial behavior reduces lifetime suicide risk [20, 21]. 

My essay notes just a few significant examples of known predictors of serious violence. And, no fancy cell phone or Apple watch would predict malleable causes or cures homicide mentioned in this essay. Our country’s leaders need to pay attention to accumulated medical and behavioral science available to any person in the world with an Internet connection to www.pubmed.gov.

PS. I do like my Apple Watch and iPhone. No offense to the devices; the idea that such devices would predict and reduce violent felony crimes is a complete distraction—unless one has visions of Brave New World or worse.

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