Word: copycats
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...Steven Stack, professor of psychiatry and criminal justice at Wayne State University, offers another explanation: the copycat effect. The copycat theory was first conceived by a criminologist in 1912, after the London newspapers' wall-to-wall coverage of the brutal crimes of Jack the Ripper in the late 1800s led to a wave of copycat rapes and murders throughout England. Since then, there has been much research into copycat events - mostly copycat suicides, which appear to be most common - but, taken together, the findings are inconclusive...
...previously published studies, Stack found that about 40% of the studies suggested an association between media coverage of suicide, particularly celebrity suicide, and suicide rates in the general public. He also found a dose-response effect: The more coverage of a suicide, the greater the number of copycat deaths. (See pictures of an exhibit of Columbine evidence...
...were those that tended to involve celebrity death or heavy media coverage - factors that, unsurprisingly, tend to co-occur. "The stories that are most likely to have an impact are ones that concern entertainment and political celebrities. Coverage of these suicides is 5.2 times more likely to produce a copycat effect than coverage of ordinary people's suicides," Stack says. In the month after Marilyn Monroe's death, for example, the suicide rate in the U.S. rose...
...difficult to say for sure if this week's events are part of a sustained dissident campaign of civic disruption or simply acts of sporadic, copycat violence. Either way, the individuals behind this new threat to Northern Ireland's increasingly fragile peace have clearly studied their history books. A similar campaign of low-level, civic disruption by the Provisional IRA in the late 1960s and 1970s led to the mass deployment of British troops on Northern Irish streets and triggered one of the bloodiest periods in the 30-year sectarian conflict known as the Troubles. (See pictures of new hope...
...measurable, positive impact, however: a revolution in product safety standards. In the wake of the Tylenol poisonings, pharmaceutical and food industries dramatically improved their packaging, instituting tamperproof seals and indicators and increasing security controls during the manufacturing process. The result has been a dramatic reduction in the number of copycat incidents - although it may be of little solace to the families of the seven killed in Chicago. But now, as the FBI brings modern technology to bear on a case long gone cold, perhaps they can hope again for something else tangible: at long last, some criminal charges...