Lack Of Information About Brown University Murders “Allows a Lot of Speculation to Flourish”
“I think with the assassination of Charlie Kirk on a campus there’s a question, no answers yet, but there’s a question whether this was a targeted killing.”
I appeared this morning on Varney & Co. on Fox Business to talk about the impact of the murder of two students at Brown University, and how the lack of information is fueling speculation.
Partial Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity)
[Introduction]
Varney::
Cornell Law Professor William Jacobson joins me now as a professor and a Providence Area resident. Are you happy with the investigation so far? There’s been an awful lot of criticism.
WAJ:
The lack of progress is very frustrating, and this is very unusual because in most of these school shooting cases, which unfortunately are too common, the killer is caught right away or commits suicide on the spot or shot. But here it’s very unusual. We don’t know who this person is. There’s a lot of speculation.
The school has not released a lot of information. And that silence from the school and the silence from the FBI allows a lot of speculation to flourish. And certainly people are very nervous in Rhode Island as they should be because we have a killer on the loose.
Varney:
Are we going to have to turn our campuses into what I would call fortified areas to guard against this kind of threat?
WAJ:
Well, you can’t. That’s the problem. And we revisit this with every school shooting, but at least with a school shooting at the K through 12 level, there’s a particular building you can secure. This is a wide ranging campus. This is a city campus. This is a campus that has hundreds of access points.
And we really need to understand what happened here. Who is the killer? Is it somebody who could have been prevented through various security measures or would those have been futile? Is it a student, a former student? Is it somebody completely unconnected?
Until we get those facts we really can’t come up with a remedy. What’s really what’s lacking here is the lack of facts. A lot of speculation, a lot of concern, but very few facts have been publicly revealed so far.
Varney:
I think your heart has to go out to those students. Many of them were locked down for what, 10, 12 hours right in the middle of finals, and now they’re leaving. I think finals have been canceled in some cases. Is that the level of anxiety which you’re seeing across the board at top universities in America?
WAJ:
Well, I think this is everyone’s nightmare. Every school’s nightmare. Every university prepares for this, but you can never be fully prepared.
When it happens, it always takes you by surprise. And that’s what we’re seeing, what looks like a very discombobulated response from Brown is not for lack of planning and not lack of preparedness. It’s that when it actually happens it’s very hard to implement those plans. So yes, I think there’s a lot of anxiety.
I think with the assassination of Charlie Kirk on a campus there’s a question, no answers yet, but there’s a question whether this was a targeted killing.
We know that a particular classroom in a particular building was targeted. This wasn’t something that took place in a public area. And I think we need to get those answers. But until we have the facts, until we know who did it, until we know why that person did it, I think that the anxiety is going to continue.
Varney:
Yeah,, I think so. Professor William Jacobson, thanks for being here. We appreciate it.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
We’re on a knife-edge casting about for hope.
The university does not have a list of students who were there as it was not a formal class. And police did conduct witness interviews during the initial response and students were let go without knowing their names.
In the following days, both the university and the police requested that anyone who was in the classroom at the time of the shooting come forward for an interview.
These are the sort of professionals who swarm to the white panel van driven by the swarthy man who hands out free donuts.
Police there are clearly incompetent.
Makes the movie Keystone Kops look highly competent & professional
Mentally ill people who posed a threat to themselves or others used to be locked up. The killer will prove to be someone, yet again, who would have been institutionalized in prior decades.
Erving Goffman’s classic sociological work _Asylums_ investigated mental institutions back when they existed, as a means to discover what goes on in total institutions (regulate everything), and found in short that nobody in such an institution does what the institution says they are doing.
Far from dysfunctional, this is normal, even outside total institutions, which was the point of the work.
People took it however as proving mental institutions are corrupt and evil, and they got rid of them.
The end of the book is good: quote
The simplest sociological view of the individual and his self is that he is to himself what his place in an organization defines him to be. When pressed, a sociologist modifies this model by granting certain complications : the self may be not yet formed or may exhibit conflicting dedications. Perhaps we should further complicate the construct by elevating these qualifications to a central place, initially defining the individual, for sociological purposes, as a stance-taking entity, a something that takes up a position somewhere between identificaiton with an organization and opposition to it, and is ready at the slightest pressure to regain its balance by shifting its involvement to either direction. It is thus _against something_ that the self can emerge. This has been appreciated by students of totalitarianism …
I have argued the same case in regard to total institutions. May this not be the situation, however, in free society, too?
Without something to belong to, we have no stable self, and yet total commitment and attachment to any social unit implies a kind of selflessness. Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wider social unit ; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personality identity often resides in the cracks.
Goffman _Asylums_ “The Underlife of a Public Institution” p.320
Ooh the pedantic little pseudo-intellectual weiner dusted off his undergrad syllabi again.
And the police still will not release what the shooter yelled when entering the classroom. I know if it was “This is MAGA land!” It would have been in all the headlines.
Not wishing to add to confusion, but internet detectives have noticed that a Palestinian activist student has had his social media scrubbed, and his physique matches the videos.
News is an organizer of anxiety. Having produced that, it has shows on how to cope with the anxiety.
In modern terms, anxiety equals clicks.
Found on another blog, a MIT Jewish professor murdered in his apartment
Boston is a skip hpe and a Jump from Rode Island , and he may have his Christmas list with him , did you know the mayor, of Providence RI
has a sign in his front yard that says free Palestine, and did you know the Palestinian students on that campus were celebrating the young women’s death at Brown, the media isn’t sharing this info, and now you know why the president of Brown will not share what the gunmen screamed before he open fire
0Press the down arrow key to see users who liked this
0Press the down arrow key to see users who disliked this
The prof was born in Portugal, has a very Portuguese name, and though websites claiming he was Jewish do exist, they seem quite few.
While not exclusively Jewish, Loureiro is a typical Sephardic Jewish last name.
It’s been story #1 on local TV as the young lady who was murdered was from a suburb of Birmingham, AL, abt 50 miles up the Interstate. She was President of the Brown University Conservative Student Organization. Hmmmmm……
The Keystone Kops from the early movie period in Hollywood could solve a case faster & act more professional than the Providence Police Department. Had that happened here in the Deep South, the Perp(s) would already be in jail or wish that they were in jail. There are plenty of local civilians who would gladly help & assist Southern LEO’s
Leave a Comment