WE LOOK AT CRIMINAL MOTIVATIONS WITH THE PEPS MODEL

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to Inside the Criminal Mind podcast, where we analyze
some of the most notorious criminal cases with psychology and
criminology combined.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Welcome back everyone. Well, hey, Andy, how are you doing.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
I'm doing good. Carlos, how are you.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Not too shabby?

Speaker 4 (00:27):
Well, it's been a little whist as we've gotten together,
and folks, we're gonna do some other interesting clips.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
You can find a lot of this if you're watching
us on YouTube.

Speaker 4 (00:35):
Go to Andy's playlist and you'll see some great stuff
that we've done already. You might be finding interesting former
FBI profiler and forensic psychologists. You'll see one of those
the playlist of of course, Andy's got his top ten
on there, so you can find more information on that.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
And I know we're gonna give you another segment soon on.

Speaker 4 (00:56):
We're gonna be looking at a closed criminal cases and
we're gonna get your take on them and what happened.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
So I'm always excited to hear that.

Speaker 5 (01:04):
And I know, and we're always interested, always interested in
topics that people want.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
To hear about.

Speaker 5 (01:08):
If there's a an old crime you'd like us to analyze,
we could certainly do that. And basically what we add
is the psychological component, the social component, the behavioral aspects
of crime. That's what we're going to talk about today, right,
Motivation of crime.

Speaker 4 (01:26):
It's a beautiful segue, yeah, because I know we were
talking about them uniuation of crime.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
And you have a system. I forgot what it's called.

Speaker 5 (01:32):
It's called PEPs and we developed it while I was
at the Behavioral Science Unit the FBI Academy, and we
were looking at our perpetrator motive in crimes?

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Why do people commit crime? How they motivated crimes.

Speaker 5 (01:45):
What we found, interestingly enough, is it there there's a taxonomy.
There's a categories, four different types of categories that people
commit crime based on these motives and and and they're
often mild, so it's difficult to say a percentage in
terms of these different categories. And there are some subsets

(02:07):
in these categories. And you can develop structured professional judgment
tools that help or assist an investigator or an analyst
kind of really mind down as to the motive of
an individual when they behave and in this case behave criminally.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
I'm sorry, are there overlaps on the categories like PEPs?

Speaker 5 (02:28):
Yeah, because the PEPs model really explains human motivation for
decision making, you know, for the cognitive process. So these
are the motives people have for behaving, but they can
also explain motives for criminal behavior. So there's really the
distinction between behaviors is one has been deemed unlawful by society. Right,

(02:51):
it's society that decides what is the rules of behavior
in any given society, speeding for example, stealing for example.
And we can get into argument debate as to you know,
inalienable rights and God's law versus Man's law.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
But what we really focus.

Speaker 5 (03:08):
In any society around the world today are the rules
by which the relationship is formed, in this case, society's
relationship with man. So there are a number of reasons
why people break these man made rules. And the acronym,
as I mentioned, is called PEPs, but it stands for
personal motives, economic motives, power based slash political. So the

(03:34):
second P is power or political because politics is power, right,
and then social social motives. Now, to be a terrorist,
for example, a terrorist crime has to satisfy two elements.
It has to be either politically motivated or socially motivated.
It cannot be economically motivated or personally motivated. Okay, and

(03:59):
that's by that the man made rules that define terrorism.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
So the definition for terrorism is any behavior.

Speaker 5 (04:09):
Actually, the DOJ definition is a violence against people or
property to course a government or a segment of the
population in furtherance and here's where the motive comes in,
in furtherance of political or social objectives. So if I
were to go in, say Steve Paddock, into a hotel,

(04:34):
and I'm going to take an automatic rifle and I
shoot five hundred people killed, I think he killed somewhere
around fifty seven people in the Las Vegas shooting. But
his motive is not in furtherance of a political goal
or a social goal.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
He's not doing it to change, you.

Speaker 5 (04:51):
Know, the laws in Las Vegas or the United States,
and it's not considered terrorism, so it wasn't worked as
a terrorist investigation. His motive was is unknown, but principally
it's speculated it was personal anger and economic. He had
lost a lot of money in gambling and so his

(05:11):
anger had built up because of this terrible losses financially
and he literally, you know, went.

Speaker 3 (05:17):
Off ther reservation and shot a bunch of people.

Speaker 5 (05:19):
So that was not considered terrorism because he didn't satisfy
those two elements. The same thing is true with Joe Stack,
who flew an airplane into a building in Austin, Texas.
And then the one you and I talked about a
couple of weeks ago, the RV bomber in Nashville, Tennessee.
His motive appears to be personal. He wanted to commit

(05:41):
suicide in a spectacular way. And so this spectacular suicide
phenomenon is like it's relative. It's a relative to the
cop suicide by cop where they want to go out
in a blaze of glory.

Speaker 3 (05:56):
But it's a personal motivation.

Speaker 5 (05:58):
So what I would offer the audience is if you
look at a crime and you.

Speaker 3 (06:02):
Look at it as a you know, amateur sleut.

Speaker 5 (06:05):
Always when you're defining the motive of the individual, look
at it from what possible personal motivations would they have?
What possible economic And sometimes it's really easy. Some guy
goes and robs a bank, you know, I think it
was Willie Sutton, a famous bank robber, was once asked
why do you rob banks? And he said, that's where
the money is. So if you're if you're committing crime

(06:27):
because of economics.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
It's fairly simple. The motive. Uh, it gets a little
more difficult.

Speaker 5 (06:33):
And sometimes when you're talking about personal or political and
or social you know, a lot of people commit crimes
for the group.

Speaker 3 (06:41):
Right.

Speaker 5 (06:41):
So we saw people storm the capitol a couple of
weeks ago, right, and they did it for the group,
you know, for the masses.

Speaker 3 (06:48):
They were patriots, right.

Speaker 5 (06:49):
And so we can identify how these individuals make the
reasoned decision. I'm a rational choice theorist, So I believe
people who can crimes go through a cost benefit, either
consciously or subconsciously, either cognitively or emotionally. They go through
this process, and sometimes very quick. So you could be

(07:11):
a protester, peaceful protester in Washington, d C. At the
you know, stop the steal rally, no intention of committing
any crimes because you're there peacefully, and then the mob
gets you riled up, right, you get so emotionally involved
that you become it's called the individualization. You lose your

(07:32):
personal identity for the larger mass. So now your motive
for going in the capitalists, because everybody did, the group
did as a social motive that led you to that
crime doesn't erase the fact that it's a crime. Because
man created laws that you violated and we're talking about
motives for those violations.

Speaker 4 (07:53):
So I mean, yeah, it doesn't I know, we're going
to be looking at a lot of the cases in
a new segment as well.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
We're gonna be looking at some of these theories. I
think that's what I wanted to do a little bit too, is.

Speaker 4 (08:04):
Is look at some of the different cases in the
last I don't want to go too far back, but
maybe in the last ten or fifteen years, and apply
the PEPs model, get your insight psychological insight as well
as legal insight.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
We'll look at some of these cases that happens.

Speaker 4 (08:22):
You know, we looked already at folks at the Chris
Watson and the Peterson case.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
You can find it on the playlist. We can find
it on our YouTube channel. You can also follow us.

Speaker 6 (08:30):
If you're listening to us on the podcast, you can
also follow us there as well with form rep Andrew Bringle.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
I'm sorry, Yah.

Speaker 5 (08:44):
Scott Peterson one or two interesting ones because they were both,
you know, sociopathic and motivated both by personal and power.
So it's interesting if you look, and this might be
of interest to our audiences. They go through the Netflix style.
If you look at some of the documentaries on Ted
Bundy and The Nightstalker and number of these you know, uh,

(09:06):
these serial killers, b DK Killer, Dennis Raider, A little commonalities.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
Let's look at the Peter case. Can we look at
the Peterson and Watts case? Do you a few the
PEPs model through.

Speaker 3 (09:15):
An Yeah, we have.

Speaker 5 (09:17):
I think we did when we when we analyze those
cases in the pastor we could certainly do it again today.
But my point is going to be when when people
are engaged in a relationship. There are two things. We've
talked about this in the past as well. Uh, there's
another element that's brought in. We talked about the boundaries
that society puts in place. Right, rules, these laws as

(09:37):
we call them in social contract theory, they're buying the
society together. But even in a primary relationship husband, wife, girl, friend, boyfriend,
you you form rules or a baseline of expectations, right,
So this baseline of expectations or expected behaviors becomes the

(09:57):
de facto law if you will, of your family, your
family rule or family law. And when there's a breach
of that rule of that of that family implicit or
explicit expectation of behavior, you have a diminished amount of
trust in that relationship, and as a result, there will

(10:20):
be an increased amount of control. So all relationships, whether
it's you know, the society in total or a very
intimate relationship between a girlfriend, boyfriend, man wife, they're predicated
on two things that balance that relationship, and that is
trust and control. What we find with serial killers and

(10:43):
sociopaths is they have a very high need for controlling
those relationships. The one you know, without using the term profile,
because we you know, FBI agents don't profile. We we
analyze behavior, behavior and nowalysis evens and the behavioral science

(11:03):
unit where I was at before I transferred to the
Behavioral Analysis unit, same processes.

Speaker 3 (11:09):
We analyze the behavior.

Speaker 5 (11:11):
But one of the common things we look for among
serial killers is that an effect of control in a relationship.
So when we see crime scenes where there appears to
be a high level of control over the victim, then
that's one of the indicators that we might be dealing
with somebody who is sociopathic and perhaps a serial killer.

Speaker 3 (11:33):
Do that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
Yeah. Always reminded me that there was a sumiar killer
that just found the other day, and I think he was.

Speaker 4 (11:42):
Shooting and he was killing elderly people in a care home,
and I think he had killed three or four.

Speaker 3 (11:49):
It's very difficult for a sociopath.

Speaker 5 (11:51):
It's very difficult for them to feel empathy. They can
feign emotion veryly well, but they have a a hard
time of genuinely feeling empathetic towards another human and that
imbalance in their psyche allows them to use and exert

(12:12):
very high levels of control over a victim. In fact,
what gives them, oftentimes sexual release is exerting that level
of control over the victim at the point of their
death or shortly after their death, and they they are.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
And feel and powered for it even at that point.

Speaker 5 (12:33):
And that seems to be a common threat among most,
if not all, serial killers that we study.

Speaker 4 (12:39):
Yeah, and that's one thing I wanted to highlight for
the audience if I could. Two, because member, folks, psychopathy
runs on a spectrum, so there's different degrees of psychopathy.
Now some argue nowadays that psychopaths have no empathy while
social paths do have empathy. There's a distinction between those
two and that continues to be debated.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
But might just throw it out there for everybody, you know.

Speaker 5 (13:02):
At the Bureau, we don't distinguish between psychopaths and paths
the same and we use hairs hairs scale.

Speaker 4 (13:15):
Yeah, I mean that's a that's a good good it's
a good assessment because it definitely tells you the great
the spectrum. So if you're under if you if you
have a friend who's over thirty on the pc L,
I would look for a new friend.

Speaker 3 (13:27):
Not just that's just my opinion, but well, you know
it's that's a good point, but it's awsome.

Speaker 5 (13:31):
It's funny because what a science has shown us in
and uh in the research, is it just because your
sociopath does not necessarily mean you're a criminal. Again, we
talked about you're a criminal when you violate these rules
of behavior, the baseline of expected norms in a society. Right,
So I often said in my lectures, good people make

(13:52):
bad decisions and bad people make good decisions. It's quite
possible for a bad person to make a good decision,
just as it's really possible for a good person to
speed or maybe have a couple of drinks and then
drive home. Bad decision. Right, you get picked up dw
I and end up in you know, a courtroom. That's
a bad decision. But is a decision. Nonetheless, some people say, well,

(14:15):
there are cases where a person has no real choice.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
Right.

Speaker 5 (14:19):
The classic one a police officer once gave me was
a kid growing up in Compton has to choose between
joining the Bloods or the Crypts. They don't their environment
determines their choice. And I argued, I pushed back on that.
I said, no, you can true, you can speak truth
to power. You could say I don't want to be

(14:41):
a crip or a blood now at your own peril, admittedly,
because now you could be. You know, violence could be
coming to you from both sides, the Bloods and the crisp.
But ultimately it is your choice. And not to say
that there aren't some very very difficult choices that people
have to make. But I think if we took the

(15:03):
position that were ultimately responsible for the choices we made,
then I think we would be much better off in
terms of making better choices going forward.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
I can add something to that too. I've heard that
argument as well, and it's.

Speaker 4 (15:16):
You know, I've talked to some gang experts, I've talked
to criminologists, and every time I've asked the question, what's
the percentage of individuals who live in areas with the
high gang activity that become gang members because I can't
imagine every single male. Will just use males in this example,
because they're pretty primarily males in gangs. There are females,
of course, and that's another story, but primarily males.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
The highest estimate.

Speaker 4 (15:40):
I've ever heard, even from gang experts in LA who
worked at department for twenty years, said twenty percent fifteen percent.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
So let's say they're off, you know.

Speaker 4 (15:48):
It's only thirty usually have seventy percent who made that
third choice that you mentioned, because we get these people
who sometimes get locked in when the political world caused
the Hobson choice.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Right, it's either that or this. That's the end of it.

Speaker 4 (16:00):
At the economist thinking is very problematic. You make a
great point.

Speaker 5 (16:04):
That's a that's a great point that you're making. I
think that you know, we see that twenty percent, right,
twenty percent is always you know, makes up eighty percent
of the problems in our in our communities. You know
that twenty eighty always comes back up. And and you
see that even in small towns where you have you know,

(16:25):
a recidivu, you have people that you know commit acts,
criminal acts. Maybe it's domestic violence, and then you know, six
months later, a year later, they're picked up for duy.
Then you know, another six months later, they're picked up
for having weed, you know, and and you see these
people cycle through. These are bad people making bad choices
right continuously, and society would like to make you know,

(16:46):
good people out of them and prove their choices. But
unfortunately there's no real mechanism in the penal system to
assist people to make better choices, cognitive choices. Or they're
emotionally damaged, right, and so their emotional damage makes it
difficult for them to have a high intellect, high enough
intellect to make good cognitive choices. And so they they're

(17:08):
impulsive and they make choices out of out of you know,
out of impulse, and and then they end up making
bad choices again and again.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
You know, you're reminded us.

Speaker 4 (17:19):
I had a conversation earlier today with another guest, two guests,
uh Stacy Strabo and Nicky Phillips, both professors of criminology. Folks,
you can catch it if you want later on in
Forensic Psychology podcast or UH Psychology of Superheroes and Villains.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
Because they wrote a.

Speaker 4 (17:34):
Book called Comic book crime. And it was interesting because
we talked about The Joker.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
And what you were saying is right.

Speaker 4 (17:42):
Everything you're saying reminds me a lot, because they're saying
that comic books are geared towards rational choice theory, and
what they stay away from is the common We talked
about this before you and it's the comic books stay
away from the narrative of rehabilitation.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
They're all about incapacitation.

Speaker 4 (18:00):
Yeah, and that doesn't even work for them either, because
every time they go to jail, they come right back out.

Speaker 2 (18:04):
And I'm still trying to figure ou why it's never
FBI in comic books. For some reason, they just didn't exist.

Speaker 4 (18:08):
You know, it's always local law enforcement eating a donut,
but there's never like FBI floating around.

Speaker 5 (18:13):
I'm trying to think if I've ever seen the FBI,
maybe in a Superman comic once, but you're right, they're not.

Speaker 3 (18:19):
They're not.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
You guys don't exist.

Speaker 5 (18:20):
I think they're just kind of generic FEDS. I think
I think you see that or the local cops. Of course,
you know Gotham is you know backdrop for New York.

Speaker 3 (18:28):
What about The Joker?

Speaker 2 (18:29):
Did you see that movie?

Speaker 3 (18:32):
I have not seen the Joker? Is that the one
with Phoenix?

Speaker 2 (18:34):
Uh yeah, okay, yeah, I to look at the model.

Speaker 4 (18:39):
Yeah, it's a great psychological movie. I think that's why
it was so different about it because I think people
could not relate some aspects.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
You could, but you can really understand the Joker.

Speaker 4 (18:50):
The old saysar Romero from Adam West, I think was
more of a caricature of that villain and you couldn't
really associate with But this one is you know, he
had problems and they obviously use some of the diagnos.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
D s M four or d s M five, I
think some five. But anyway to see.

Speaker 3 (19:07):
If you can act the actor was, was is it John?
That's it? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, I'll have to watch that.

Speaker 5 (19:14):
I know it's been out for a while, probably on
Netflix or a Prime or something, and I'll have to
look at it.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Because that'd be a good analysis.

Speaker 4 (19:21):
And I know we're going to be looking at a
case in a little bit, so you can catch that
other episode two folks, We're gonna be looking at a
very unusual case of a CEO of a peanut corporation
who got twenty eight years.

Speaker 3 (19:33):
For an economically motivated decision.

Speaker 4 (19:36):
Right, the ways that don't give away already.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
Right, we're analyzing with the PEPs model as well as
other things.

Speaker 3 (19:45):
You definitely want to stay tuned for that.

Speaker 5 (19:47):
Yeah, you know what's interesting too in terms of the
PEPs model is it's it's not it doesn't live in
a bubble.

Speaker 3 (19:51):
Right.

Speaker 5 (19:52):
The PEPs model of the motivations and behavior are also
influenced by the psychology furdu its context, right, time and
space environment that we live. And we mentioned briefly mentioned
that earlier. And humans are made up of three dimensions, right,
our we have our biological dimension, right, the physiological self

(20:15):
and and and and that science they call it homeostesis,
right that you're looking for Your body is trying to
balance itself. And you have all kinds of examples of
that in physiology and psycho and biology. But then you
have psychology and and and you're trying mental health to
be balanced as well. Right, So in psychology you're you're

(20:36):
looking for balance mental health. You don't want to be
too high emotionally, too low emotionally. And oftentimes our behavior
is influenced by our psychology, our psyche how how we
see the world through our personality and our outlook and
then the third is sociology. Right, the groups we we
find ourselves in. Now, we may you know, choose bad friends.

(21:00):
We may be in environments where there's not really a
lot of good choices, but the reality is that those
groups do shape us. You know, it's the if you
sleep with dogs, you're going to get fleas Edwin Sutherland's
defferential association and you know it says it, Yeah, you're
going to adopt the behaviors of the people around you.
They're going to become your social norms.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
So it'll component of pets.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
Right, right, And that's the social component of pets.

Speaker 5 (21:26):
So the reality is that those motivations, those personal motivations,
those economic motivations, even the power based and social based
motivations oftentimes come from who we are biologically, psychologically, and
sociology sociologically in the context.

Speaker 3 (21:44):
Of the environments that we put ourselves in.

Speaker 5 (21:47):
So in my classes, I talk about how can we
control this this ecology?

Speaker 3 (21:52):
Right?

Speaker 5 (21:53):
The way we do that is by promoting pro social
environments that promote behavior with positive intent.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
The kernel of behavior.

Speaker 5 (22:04):
If you're going to look for the seed of behavior
and humans, it develops well before the PEPs models.

Speaker 3 (22:12):
It's the concept of intent.

Speaker 5 (22:15):
And so if you can identify your intent as positive
or negative, benevolent or benevolent, then everything springs from that,
Everything grows from that intent. If my intent, being the
joker is to commit crimes and do evil in disregard
of society's rules, well then the only way to control

(22:39):
me is by society using a high level of control
to get me to comply, right, because there's a very
little there's gonna be very little trust in that relationship.
And so what you end up having, interestingly enough, in
areas where there's a high level of lack of predictability
and behavior against the rules that man puts in place

(23:02):
of the laws is a higher police presence. And why
is that Because you need the higher level of control
to maintain stability and balance in that environment, and there's
a very there's a very low level of public trust.
So it's not surprisingly if you think in these terms

(23:22):
why there's a lack of trust among the population in
inner city high crime areas and the police. It's because
there's a lack of predictability as it relates.

Speaker 3 (23:33):
To the laws.

Speaker 5 (23:35):
Therefore, higher police presence, and the higher police presence represents
a higher level of control to maintain stability and balance
in that community.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
I think it's a great model.

Speaker 4 (23:45):
It really gets the ball rolling and gets you thinking.
Now we're going to be out of time now, but
we're going to get ready to hit over to our
other take from the FBI profile here Andrew Ringo. You
can find him at Behavioral Science and at LLC dot
com so make sure you check that out Real Science
Unit at LLC dot Comedy. Thanks again for the time,
yep enjoy it always a great check.

Speaker 3 (24:08):
Out the website.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
Check out the website folks, and check out Andy's playlist.
If you're watching us on YouTube or if you go
to YouTube, check out.

Speaker 4 (24:16):
Andy's playlist as well. Out the Doctor Carlos Show YouTube channel.
You can see Andy's playlist there with the rest of
the episodes that we did. We did a great one
on Chris Watson, Peterson and some other things that the
Nashville bombing is also on there we talked about that.
You can also check out our podcast Inside the Criminal
Mind with former profiler Andrew Brinkle. Thanks for listening, everybody
right