The Weakest Link:  Dupnik

NYC Mayor Bloomberg is no longer the most incompetent local official in America. The torch has been passed to Pima County Sheriff, Clarence Dupnik for his disastrous mishandling of Jared Loughner who went on a shooting rampage.

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Dupnik’s non stop blathering about how talk radio drove Loughner to shoot into a crowd was crazy enough. As the county’s top law enforcement officer, Dupnik is supposed to be investigating a crime, not campaigning for higher office on the Democrat ticket. It’s bad enough that his comments are gifts to Loughner’s defense attorneys. It’s downright Holderesque to assert phony facts without a scintilla of actual evidence. But the sheriff desperately needs to deflect attention away from himself and his gross incompetence when it comes to all matters Jared Loughner. This is not one of those cases in which a normally “nice, quiet kid” suddenly goes berserk. People who knew Loughner were hardly surprised to learn he was the shooter. They were expecting him to do something like this. Even the NYT admits Loughner was well known to law enforcement, as was his not exactly normal family:

He was a nihilist and loves causing chaos, and that is probably why he did the shooting, along with the fact he was sick in the head,’ said Zane Gutierrez, 21, who was living in a trailer outside Tucson and met Mr. Loughner sometimes to shoot at cans for target practice.

The police visited the Loughner home more than once before the shooting. A college instructor was so unnerved by the kid that he kicked Loughner out of class. Loughner had five contacts with the campus police. Fifty two year old former classmate, Lynda Sorenson:

We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon. Everyone interviewed would say, Yeah, he was in my math class and he was really weird. I sit by the door with my purse handy. If you see it on the news one night, know that I got out fast…

A fifty two year old female has a pretty well honed intuition. Maybe she should be Pima’s next sheriff. Loughner’s fixation with Gabrielle Giffords began during the pre Palin era of 2007. It won’t take a lot of testing to determine that Loughner is paranoid schizophrenic. Most mentally ill people are not dangerous–this group is an exception. It’s also a disorder especially resistant to treatment. Doctors and therapists are viewed as part of the conspiracy, not as helpers. Sheriff Dupnik’s ignorance of such a dangerous mental disorder is frightening. The hallmark of schizophrenia is that the patient responds to internal rather than external cues. These are the people who hear voices.

’Jared felt nothing existed but his subconscious,’ Mr. Gutierrez said. ‘The dream world was what was real to Jared, not the day-to-day of our lives.’

That’s a pretty good description of schizophrenia. When those delusions are paranoid in nature, you have an unpredictably dangerous person. Loughner’s rage was directed at the demons in his own mind. Unfortunately, he perceives them as being part of the external world. Too bad the sheriff missed all of that. Perhaps stationing a deputy or two at the Giffords event would have been prudent given all the sheriff knew about Loughner’s history. Or perhaps Dupnik could have taken this young man’s obvious mental illness seriously over the years. It says a lot about Dupnik’s weakness of character that he cannot even entertain the possibility that he may bear some responsibility for the tragedy. Let’s hope we see recall petitions floating around soon enough. (Joy Tiz holds a Master of Science in psychology with an emphasis in child and adolescent testing and diagnosis and ten years clinical experience working with severely emotionally disturbed teens.)