Thin Blue Mind / Smokey Heroes
Police Psychology: Fake News
by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP
My first TV show appearance was in March 1991, a couple of days after the Rodney King Incident in Los Angeles. The president of the police union I worked with asked me to go along on a TV interview because the deck was stacked against him with a member of the ACLU and civil rights leaders as the other guests. The attacks were vicious against the union president at first, then I spoke up and said that many mental illness protocols show that “jumping to conclusions” is a type of delusional thinking that comes with narcissistic, histrionic and borderline personality disorders, and even worse comes with paranoid psychosis where conspiracy theories play out. The fact was we didn’t have any knowledge of what happened before the videotape of Rodney King, the toxicology report on him, or even his history. I suggested we should wait for those results to draw conclusions. That was not a popular idea with the anti-police persons, but it did shut them up, and gave the PBA president something to play off. History confirmed my contention. As it turns out, when the opening ten seconds of the video that the TV Station KTLA had edited out were shown, the officers were acquitted in state court. The press caused a reaction, created news, and once created it was not destroyed. Essentially, if that video were not to have riled masses, causing riots which enabled part of LA to be held hostage, this would have probably been handled internally by the department with the same results. One officer was later found to have made six unnecessary blows after King was subdued and a second officer (the second was the supervisor) were found guilty of a civil rights violation in federal court.
“Fake News” is no stranger to people in law enforcement. Name the police administrator (or psychologist) who hasn’t been misquoted (or misinterpreted) by the media, and I will show you someone that hasn’t spoken to the media very much. It is not endemic to all media, but it does show up a lot. It has gotten extreme lately on both political sides. Russian collusion, traitors by email, selling the country to enemies either by hotel room profits or donations, it is getting hard to distinguish what is news and what is not. Is it just our innate desire to find the needle of evil in the haystack of life? Or is it being fed to us to draw delusional conclusions that border on mental illness? Either way, psychology is definitely involved here. (more…)
without a spouse living with you. What do you do now?
spend 10 hours on a project you will be twice as far behind than if you only spend five hours on the project.” I think these were meant to be humorous, but I am not exactly laughing about them. In fact, it may have been true back then, but now it is more like work expands to fill any time in the day, including the time set aside for relaxation and comfort, and sometimes even dinner. 
before disco died in the charts). It spoke to every woman “thinking how he did me wrong” and she “grew strong” and learned she had to survive. It was excitement, passion, and most of all, something a large part of the record buying population could relate to. And it was for men too. Not too shabby for the “B” side of a small record by a Newark “New Joisy” girl.
more then anyone in the room on the topic and when I left the room, everyone was supposedly impressed as hell. Then I came back in the room, and was told that they felt I was too obsessed with the topic and I needed to learn how to live instead of just the science. See my mom had died in my first year of graduate school, and I had finished a five-year program in 3 ½ years, and my dissertation was three times the size of most of the dissertations they had seen. The committee gave me an exercise in the book The Magic of Thinking Big and said I wasn’t finished my school until I did the exercise. I was in shock, but I went home and absorbed the book before I went to sleep (I guess I did tend to obsess) and the exercise was to make a “wish list” of the things I wanted to do in my life. My list should be 100 items long and I was to think big.