I want you to imagine a completely ordinary scenario
for a second. Okay. You are walking down the
street, maybe you're looking at the trees, or
checking your phone, totally unbothered, just
going about your day. Right, just a normal Tuesday.
Exactly. And then, suddenly lights out. You are
on the ground. You have absolutely no idea what
just happened or who hit you. That is, yeah,
that's a terrifying thought. If that sounds terrifying,
it should. And for this brief, incredibly intense
moment in time, it really felt like this exact
nightmare was playing out everywhere. You probably
remember the highly recognizable surveillance
footage from October 2020. Oh, the Rick Moranis
video. Yes. Totally unprovoked. A man walks right
up to the 67 -year -old actor Rick Moranis on
Central Park West and just delivers a single
devastating blow to the head. It remains a genuinely
shocking piece of footage to watch. There's no
buildup, no argument. It's just an immediate
strike. And it perfectly encapsulates the subject
we are digging into today, which is the so -called
knockout game. Right. And if you were anywhere
near a television or a news feed a decade ago,
you could not escape that phrase. The basic premise,
looking at the sources from the time, was a random
assault on a passerby, where an assailant, very
often with lookouts or accomplices standing by,
tries to render an unsuspecting victim unconscious
with a single sucker punch. And while knockout
game became the dominant catch -all term that
the media eventually latched onto, it actually
went by a whole host of aliases. It really depended
on the era and the specific city you were in.
Like what? Well, sometimes you'd see it referred
to as knockout king or the much more brutally
descriptive point him out, knock him out. Jeez.
Yeah. There was also polar bearing, which was
a term used specifically to describe instances
where the victims were white and the assailants
were black. And if you go back further to the
late 80s and early 90s, you'll find similar random
street attacks referred to as wilding or the
one hitter quitter. It also definitely was not
just an American phenomenon, right? Over in Europe,
it was known by the rather dystopian term happy
slapping. Which sounds ridiculously upbeat for
what was actually happening. It really does.
It was basically groups of kids using early camera
phones to record brutal street assaults. OK,
let's unpack this, because our mission today
is to dig into our stack of sources to untangle
the brutal reality of these attacks from the
massive and often hysterical media panic that
surrounded them. And I think this deep dive is
a masterclass for you, the listener, in how street
crime, social media and the 24 hour news cycle
collide. We are looking at a textbook example
of how a cultural narrative takes shape. Going
into the research for this, my baseline assumption
was that this had to be a modern smartphone era
phenomenon. You know, kids performing for an
online audience to get viral fame or whatever.
It's a fair assumption. But the records indicate
that the violence itself is not a new phenomenon
at all. We can actually trace the specific game
aspect all the way back to September 1992. The
MIT case. Right. Yngve Raustein, a Norwegian
exchange student studying at MIT, was just walking
down the street when he was attacked by three
teenagers. They later told prosecutors they were
playing a game called Knockout. Raustein was
stabbed and killed after falling to the ground.
And if you look at the psychological mechanics
of that 1992 attack, there was a chilling rule
built into their version of the game. If the
primary assailant failed to knock out the target
with that single punch, his own companions would
turn on him instead. Wow. That is an incredibly
dark peer pressure dynamic. It is. It totally
weaponizes the group dynamic. But while the senseless
violence wasn't new, the technological shift
of the mid -2000s undeniably changed the nature
of the crime. Right. It went from a localized
act of aggression to a performative broadcast.
Precisely. Because of the cameras. By 2005, BBC
News was thoroughly documenting those UK happy
slapping incidents you mentioned earlier. Where
the primary objective wasn't just the assault.
Exactly. The objective was to capture the violence
on video and post it online. It disrupted communities
so severely that the French government under
Nicolas Sarkozy actually took drastic action.
They passed a national law making it illegal
to film and post acts of violence online specifically
to combat this exact trend. To fundamentally
change a country's legal framework over Internet
videos in 2005 is a massive deal. But regardless
of what you call it or whether there's a camera
rolling, the human cost here is just devastating.
Absolutely. When you look past the media buzzwords,
the actual toll is staggering. We have a trail
of tragedies in the sources. Take a 2009 case
in Decatur, Illinois. A 61 -year -old bicyclist
was stomped to death by a group of teens who
were playing point -em -out, knock -em -out.
Or the incredibly tragic 2011 case in St. Louis,
Missouri. A 72 -year -old man, Hong Nguyen, was
killed, and his 62 -year -old wife, Yen, was
badly injured in a random attack. The assailant
in that case was an 18 -year -old named Alex
Murphy. He was ultimately convicted and sentenced
to life in prison plus an additional 25 years.
Then you look at Chicago in 2012. A 62 -year
-old man named Delfino Mora was killed. And the
judicial system did not hold back on anyone involved.
Anthony Malcolm, the guy who simply filmed the
attack, he didn't even throw the punch, got 30
years in prison. 30 years just for filming. Yes.
His accomplices, the actual attackers, received
27 and 33 years. Lives ended and multiple other
lives were thrown away behind bars. What's fascinating
here is the bizarre gamification of violence.
By assigning these horrible life -ending acts
a playful, almost sport -like name like Knockout
King, it created a false umbrella. And that is
exactly why understanding these distinct, disconnected
tragedies became incredibly difficult when the
media started grouping them together. And that
media grouping hit an absolute fever pitch in
2013. That is the year this phenomenon seemingly
exploded. You see a massive spike in reports
all across the country. In Syracuse, a man named
Michael Daniels died. In Hoboken, New Jersey,
Ralph Santiago, a disabled homeless man, was
found dead after being attacked. Yale University
police even issued campus -wide alerts after
seven separate attacks took place in a single
month. The sheer volume of reports in 2013 made
it feel inescapable. But the epicenter of the
panic and the place where the narrative took
a sharp turn was Brooklyn. Specifically, the
Crown Heights neighborhood. Right. Crown Heights
saw a sudden string of attacks where the victims
were Jewish. The tension in the neighborhood
skyrocketed. A suspect named Amrit Mirage was
arrested and explicitly charged with a hate crime
in connection to the assaults. Now, it should
be noted he firmly denied the charges and any
anti -Semitic motive. But the damage to the community's
sense of safety was done. Exactly. The NYPD heavily
stepped up patrols in the area, and the Anti
-Defamation League had to issue a public statement
specifically addressing attacks targeting Jewish
individuals in Brooklyn. And we should probably
do a quick rule check here for you listening.
We are diving into some incredibly heated political
and racial territory from 2013. We are impartially
reporting the contents of the sources and not
endorsing any political viewpoint. We're just
looking at how these political flashpoints fueled
the media fire. Absolutely. We're just the messengers
here. And in Brooklyn, that political controversy
centered around a newly elected Democratic City
Councilwoman named Lori Kumbo. She posted a lengthy
letter on her Facebook page attempting to explain
the root causes of the attacks. And what did
she say? She suggested that the accomplishments
of the Jewish community might have triggered
feelings of resentment among black youth, creating
a sense that Jewish success wasn't also their
success. The backlash to that was immediate and
severe. The ADL publicly called her post troubling,
stating that it evoked classic anti -Semitic
stereotypes regarding Jewish wealth and control.
Kumbo did later issue a formal apology for those
remarks. But the entire episode highlights just
how quickly this ceased being just a crime story.
It became a massive flashpoint for deep -seated
racial and cultural tensions. The media narrative
became hyper focused on this one very specific
demographic dynamic black assailants attacking
white or Jewish victims. But when you actually
read the reports, the reality of random street
violence rarely fits perfectly into one neat
demographic box. Which brings us to a frankly
bizarre twist. Here's where it gets really interesting.
In November 2013, this entire media narrative
was flipped on its head in Katy, Texas. The Conrad
Alvin Barrett case. Yes. Barrett was a 29 -year
-old white man who decided to participate in
the phenomenon. But he explicitly hunted for
a black victim. He eventually found an 81 -year
-old black man walking alone and hit him so hard
that he broke the elderly man's jaw. Barrett
wasn't just participating in a trend. He was
actively trying to manipulate the media coverage
of it. He recorded himself using racial epithets
and literally wondering aloud if a white -on
-black attack would get national media attention.
He was testing the news cycle to see if the outrage
was about the violence itself or about the races
of the people involved. It's an incredibly twisted
mindset. And from a legal standpoint, this case
is highly significant. Because of his explicit
recorded motives, this was the only time the
U .S. Justice Department got involved to charge
a knockout attack as a federal hate crime. His
defense attorney attempted to argue that Barrett
was suffering from unmedicated bipolar disorder,
right? They did. But the federal judge still
sentenced him to 71 months in prison. So if you
step back and look at the landscape in late 2013,
from the tension in Brooklyn to the hate crime
in Texas to the tragic deaths, politicians were
desperately scrambling to figure out how to stop
this. They wanted to use legislative muscle.
Exactly. In New York, Republican Assemblyman
Jim Tedisco proposed the Knockout Assault Deterrent
Act. It sought to charge juvenile attackers as
adults across the board and severely punish anyone
who even recorded the attacks. Which echoes the
2005 French law we discussed earlier. But not
everyone agreed that a new law was the right
tactic. Democratic Assemblyman John McDonald
argued against it. He agreed that stiffer penalties
were warranted, but he pointed out that assault
is already illegal. Creating a highly specific
branded bill wasn't necessary. Meanwhile, Wisconsin
Republican Dean Koffer was considering a very
similar deterrent bill for his state. But the
pushback wasn't just coming for the legislature.
Community leaders built a surprisingly diverse
and vocal coalition to condemn the game. We're
talking rapid -fire denouncements. Brooklyn District
Attorney Kenneth P. Thompson, Eric Adams, Reverend
Al Sharpton, Russell Simmons. Former NYC Mayor
David Dinkins had that slogan, no to KO. Yes.
Even retired boxer Mike Tyson went on the Piers
Morgan show to weigh in. He completely stripped
the game aspect away and said these perpetrators
were just evil people doing evil things. That
is a fascinating distillation of the issue. Yet
amidst all this public condemnation, the actual
police chiefs were facing a massive strategic
dilemma. How so? Well, NYPD Commissioner Raymond
Kelly and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter both
explicitly refused to use the term knockout game.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, you
start to see the law enforcement logic. Because
naming it gives it power. Exactly. The police
knew that validating the game by using its catchy
brand name would almost certainly spawn copycats.
They absolutely did not want to hand disaffected
youth a nationally recognized banner to fly under.
And that strategic hesitation brings us to the
biggest question of this whole deep dive. Have
you as a listener ever noticed how the news can
make a rare event feel like it's happening everywhere.
It's a classic media distortion because by late
2013 political analysts and journalists started
asking if the knockout game was a real trend
or just a media panic built out of isolated incidents.
The statistics are really telling here. Jamel
Bowie of The Daily Beast directly compared the
knockout panic to the wilding panic and those
urban legends about gang members shooting you
if you flash your headlights at them. Right.
He pointed out a crucial mathematical reality.
In 2012 alone, the FBI reported 127 ,577 unarmed
assaults in the United States. Over 127 ,000.
Exactly. When you have a baseline of over 100
,000 random assaults, pulling a dozen of them
out and looping the footage on cable news makes
it really hard to... statistically prove a game
trend. It just proves that street violence exists.
And honestly, the journalism surrounding this
phenomena was getting incredibly sloppy. Jesse
Single wrote an investigation for the Columbia
Journalism Review. He proved that, yes, the game
existed locally. It wasn't a total hoax. But
he found the media was sparking an unnecessary
race -driven panic through careless reporting.
The East London footage is the perfect example
of that. Oh, this detail is staggering. U .S.
local news stations were airing this truly terrifying
CCTV footage of a woman getting completely blindsided
and punched from behind. They played it constantly
to visually illustrate the American knockout
game epidemic. But that footage was actually
from East London. Yes. It had absolutely nothing
to do with the American trend. It was just scary
video that fit the narrative, so they aired it.
The coverage became so disjointed that MSNBC's
Chris Hayes actually gave the knockout game his
award for Overcovered Stories of the Year. We
also have to acknowledge the demographics being
questioned. Robin Obcarian at the Los Angeles
Times was highly critical of how the story was
framed. She argued that conservative analysts
were pushing a lazy narrative of black teens
randomly attacking white people. She cited the
Texas case with Barrett as a counterpoint. And
she highlighted DeJure Washington. He was a black
teen who assaulted a white man in 2011. Bill
O 'Reilly actually played the video. of that
specific assault on his show to fan the flames
of racial hatred. But the kicker is that Washington
later went on Nightline to discuss the incident.
He claimed the attack had absolutely nothing
to do with race. And he said that at the time
he threw the punch, he had never even heard of
the knockout game. He didn't even know he was
playing the game the media accused him of playing.
When you have a nationwide panic vibrating at
that frequency, it breeds false reports. Like
the woman in St. Louis. Exactly. She went to
the police falsely claiming she was a victim
of the knockout game. But an investigation revealed
her own boyfriend had hit her. She completely
made up the knockout story to cover for him because
she knew it was the hottest topic on the news.
This raises an important question about how we
consume information. During the height of the
panic, even the people physically on the ground
couldn't agree on the scale. Right. St. Louis
police said the game was limited to maybe five
to nine kids in the entire city. But when local
teenagers were interviewed, they claimed 10 to
15 percent of their peers played the game. Who
do you believe? So what does this all mean? We've
combed through the origins, the horrific tragedies,
the political grandstanding and the media panic.
And what this deep dive reveals is an incredibly
complex web. Yes, brutal, senseless, gamified
violence absolutely occurred. It destroyed lives.
That is an undeniable fact. But the packaging
of these disparate, disconnected street crimes
into one overarching race -driven media epidemic
often distorted reality. It led to sloppy reporting
and widespread panic. And I want to remind you,
the listener, that your superpower as a learner
is the ability to look past those sensational
headlines. You have to look at the raw data and
the humanity underneath the panic. I want to
leave you with a final thought to mull over on
your own today. We've talked about the media
reporting on the knockout game to warn the public.
But consider the psychological observer effect
in physics. Does the act of observing something
change it? That's a great point. By taking random,
disconnected acts of street violence, giving
them a catchy brand name, and giving them national
airtime, did the 24 -hour news cycle inadvertently
provide the exact fame structure, and rulebook
needed to turn a scattered set of crimes into
a self -fulfilling prophecy. Did the warning
create the game? It is a heavy question to consider.
Always keep questioning the narrative. Thank
you so much for joining us and we will catch
you on the next deep dive.