Sheriff's Deputy Jay Baker's press conference on the Atlanta spa shootings was a master class in victim blaming
- Police rep. Capt. Jay Baker said Atlanta Asian spa shooting suspect Robert Long was having "a very bad day" when he committed the crimes.
- Baker's comments during a press conference Wednesday intimated the victims were sex workers.
- He said that Long was trying to "take out that temptation" by shooting them.
On Tuesday evening a shooter killed eight people - six of whom were Asian women - during a violent killing spree at three Atlanta-area spas.
But you'd be hard-pressed to understand that based on the press conference given by Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee Sheriff's Office on Wednesday morning. During the event, Capt. Baker spoke extensively about what suspect Robert Aaron Long - who was charged with eight counts of murder - told him was his apparent motivation for the killings.
Long, Baker said, admitted to the crimes but said that they were "not racially motivated" - despite the fact that all three businesses targeted were Asian-owned and six out of eight victims were Asian women.
The attack comes amid a significant increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans.
Long has not yet been charged with a hate crime, but Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms told CNN she believed hate crime charges would be "appropriate, but I will defer to the prosecutors to make that determination."
Capt. Baker said Long denied he'd committed a hate crime.
"He did take responsibility for the shootings. He said that early on once we began the interviews with him. He claims that these, and as the chief said, this is still early, but he does claim that it was not racially motivated."
The distinction matters because a hate crime designation imposes additional minimum sentencing. In Georgia, it adds an additional six to 12 months to a sentence.
Instead, Baker said, "He apparently has an issue, what he considers sex addiction and sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places, and it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate. Like I said, it's still early on, but those were comments that he made."
Let's stop right there to break down what Long is saying, and what Baker's parroting of Long's statements assumes.
By publicly repeating Long's statement about sex addiction, Baker subtly intimates that the victims were sex workers, something that has not been publicly confirmed. (And something that, if confirmed, should in no way be used to blame these women for their own deaths.)
He repeats without questioning the suspect's motives, gives credibility to the notion that the suspect felt victimized by the "temptation" and lost control.
Baker took advantage of the natural privilege police officers are given in situations like this; they're treated as if they're neutral parties in these stories, without prejudices or biases when it comes to the victims or the perpetrators.
But that shouldn't be a given, especially not in the case of Baker, who was revealed on Wednesday to have promoted T-shirts blaming the COVID-19 pandemic on China.
Baker went on at length to offer a humanizing interpretation of the suspect's behavior.
"It sounds to me like these locations, he sees them as an outlet for him," Baker said. "That it's something that he shouldn't be doing and an issue with porn, and that he was attempting to take out that temptation."
He also minimized the gravity of the shootings by saying that Long was simply "fed up" and having a "very bad day."
"When I spoke to the investigators, they interviewed him this morning and they got that impression, that, yes, he understood the gravity of it. And he was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. And yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did," Baker said.
Baker's tack reflects a common thread in coverage of white male perpetrators - that mental illness caused them to commit the crime, removing a layer of culpability from them.
"When perpetrators of violence are people of color, journalists, politicians and many citizens treat their violence as natural, expected," Jonathan Metzi at the Washington Post wrote in 2017. "But when shooters are white men who kill white victims, politicians like Trump, and indeed many other facets of white America, reach for the notion of an unstable, angry, isolated person driven to mass murder."
That's as true now, as it was then.
But, Dr. Natasha Bhuyan wrote for the American Association of Family Physicians,"blaming mental illness only serves to further stigmatize patients who have mental health issues as inherently dangerous." The same could be said of blaming video games, or in this case, sex addiction.
You need only look at the cases of Elliot Rodger, Dylann Roof, or Adam Lanza to see a history of decoupling responsibility from white mass shooters, despite the fact that the majority of mass shooters are white men.
As Ishena Robinson at The Root wrote, "It's deeply disturbing whenever we are reminded how far into the realms of inhumane, unbelievable behavior that defenders of whiteness will go to diminish, explain away and understate that very heinous behavior."
Robert Aaron Long was having a "really bad day," according to Capt. Jay Baker. Long's "really bad day" cost eight people their lives.