About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the twenty-first century.
Paris lives in memory and represents a frightening new reality. The enemy of one nation is not another nation. The combatants are not wearing identifiable uniforms. War is not declared, that is, the time and place to engage in combat is not scheduled. A ceasefire is never agreed upon. The “enemy” might be one of us; a radicalized member of our family. We must stop those who would murder us wholesale, but how? We must find them, but how? We must fight back, but how?
A key part of the answer may not be found in the curricula at West Point or in “The Art of War” but at the Center for Disease Control. The most propitious “connection” may not be to past wars but to past plagues.
In 2011 public health scientist April Zeoli mounted a study to determine if violence spreads like disease, not approximately but exactly like disease.
The researcher and her team studied every homicide in Newark, New Jersey in the quarter century between 1982 and 2007 — all 2,366 of them. They selected Newark because the murder rate in Newark sometimes approached three times the national average.
They asked this question: Could the model for fighting violence be the same as the model for fighting contagion? Can we identify areas where the conditions are ripe for disease/violence to break out? Can we track the spread of violence by tracing the contacts between people in the same way we trace the spread of infection? What makes some immune and others vulnerable? Can we find “patient zero” and thereby find the source of the disease/radicalizing agent, and if so, so what?
The solution is inherent in the problem, that is, knowing the cause directs the cure.
How effectively we fight may be a function of how clearly we understand what we are fighting. Is violence an individual psychological problem or a societal problem? Are we looking for a psychological profile, group dynamics or economic conditions?
When researchers study the outbreak of a disease they do not ask what is it about the individuals that made them sick. They look for a pattern of contagion – the process by which it spreads. If you look at terrorism as a contagious disease, what useful information might you find?
Zeoli was searching for the three requirements for infection to spread: the source of the infection, the mode of transmission, and the susceptible population. Her team traced every murder and plugged the information into software developed to track disease and designed to answer the questions: how is it spreading, where will it go next?
It is a radical departure from how we think about crime – especially murder. If asked, most people might respond that murderers, especially wholesale murderers, are “crazy” — aberrant in some way. We search for something in that individual that allows them to kill. That may be our emotional response to the actions but it may not be helpful in finding and stopping the perpetrators.
When the researchers plugged the data into a software model designed to track infectious diseases, they found two important bits of information: how murder spreads and where it might go next.
“We hypothesized that the distribution of murder was not random but moved by a process similar to the spread of disease,” Zeoli wrote in the journal, Justice Quarterly.
She also tracked firearms and gangs, hypothesizing that they operated as infectious agents. Police already track “hot spots” but Zeoli said, “This model could make predictions about how and where homicide would spread in future.”
Zeoli also found some neighborhoods resistant to murder although all the other factors were present. To use the language of infectious disease research, some were immune.
Once researchers figure out what makes some neighborhoods “resistant” to homicide, Zeoli wrote, despite having the same risk factors as areas with high homicide rates, policymakers could apply those insights to “inoculate” other areas in order to prevent homicide.
A recent article by John Titlow posed the question: can Ebola be controlled by treating it like a terrorist network? It reverses the application: using terror strategies to fight disease and suggests that the approaches are interchangeable.
The basis of both approaches is data mining: the process by which the US military tracks terrorists and the CDC tracks contagion is similar. In both instances, you are tracking two things: where is it appearing and how is it being passed. In short, you are tracking networks of people, and asking: who is connected to whom?
“It is a natural progression from terrorism to disease,” a military spokesman said.
This is our new world of threat assessment and whatever tools that might help are being employed.
Here is the irony: in the twentieth century, they told us that we needed the bombs — the bigger, the better. The bombs were deterrents. No nation, they assured us, would be crazy enough to declare war, to launch a bomb knowing the consequences. It was to be an armed peace.
Well, now we know – someone is crazy enough and it is not a nation. It is an individual with an explosive in his jockey shorts, a bomb in the trunk of his car, in the backpack of a 12-year-old girl; it is a pregnant woman, two brothers in Boston, a tiny “cell” in Paris, and we can’t find them or stop them — until after.
A friend wrote me: “This world is a corrupt beautiful place full of infinite possibilities.” I wonder if he knew what he was saying.
