Why Did He Do It?

They were honest questions that went something like this. “Do they know why?” Did he leave a note or anything?”

In our quest to understand motivations we often want to rush through the facts and get to the answers. It reminds me somewhat of something a friend used to say: Everybody wants to be a racer but no one wants to run.

I suppose that television dramas have a role to play. It’s the instant gratification that comes at the end of the hour when the crime is solved. During the course of the hour viewers are fed a diet of criminalistics, criminal law, constitutional procedure, and criminology - most of it flawed.


Most of the time when something as horrific as a mass shooting occurs we want to know who and why. In a rush to judgment we tend to substitute “what” answers for “why” answers and then move on. Even then, the “what’ answers are not always clearly answered and defined.

Technology, without a doubt, has moved policing into the Twenty-first Century. Cameras at intersections, parking lots, banks, homes, and businesses make it easy for Big Brother to do his job. Facial recognition, DNA, 1’s and 0’s, have all contributed to the ability of police to do their work, but in spite of all these technological advances, the human element remains the one constant in crime solving. That one constant is the ability to reason - to sort through the technological conclusions and make one overarching determination about a crime.

Solving a crime does not necessarily mean determining why a crime was committed, yet criminal investigators often look to motivation to narrow their search of suspects.

In my world, motivation for committing a crime and why a person commits a crime are two different things. Motive may be determined within minutes or days at the most. Why a person commits a crime may take months or longer to determine, and even then becomes questionable. Making those decisions will first require finding all the relevant information, sorting through the data, and fitting the pieces together into some logical explanation. These days this means looking through information stored on computer hard drives, including the 1’s and 0’s that have been deleted, looking through mountains of photographs, retrieving text messages, obtaining DNA samples, talking to friends and relatives, visiting doctors and therapists, checking credit card purchases, examining travel, visiting bars frequented by a defendant, checking school records, checking intersection and parking lot camera recordings, looking at bank deposits and withdrawals, reviewing military records, digging through juvenile and adult criminal history records, and sorting through anything and everything that the foregoing leads one to. It can literally take months to do this and technology will be of very little assistance.

And after all that takes place, no one, not even the experts, will agree as to why a person committed a crime