Mob Hides Attackers, Expert Says : Trial: Witness in Denny case disputes key defense theory. He says chaos allows predatory people to commit violence without fear of being caught.

Seemingly random acts of riot violence are calculated attacks carried out by people using an unruly mob for cover, a criminologist testified Friday in the Reginald O. Denny beating trial.

Paul Tracy, a sociology professor at the University of Dallas, disputed a key defense theory that people caught up in rioting only react to a mob’s frenzied impulses.

“The group, especially when it is behaving in an unruly way, provides an opportunity for people who behave in a predatory way,” Tracy said. “There’s a perceived anonymity that there is so much frenzy, people can get away with violent acts that they normally couldn’t get away with.”

Tracy is one of the final witnesses expected to be called in the trial of Damian Monroe Williams, 20, and Henry Keith Watson, 29, who are accused of trying to kill Denny and seven others in a string of attacks at Florence and Normandie avenues April 29, 1992.

He is the second sociologist called by the prosecution to criticize the theory of “crowd contagion” propounded by defense witness Armando Torres Morales, a professor at the UCLA School of Medicine.

Morales’ theory emphasizes the inability of riot participants to form the intent to hurt others or assume leadership roles.

But yesterday, Cal State Northridge professor Lawrence Yablonsky called Morales’ theory “archaic,” and Tracy, who specializes in the study of violent behavior, said it is out of line with current thinking.

Tracy said he has participated in the largest research study in the nation of factors determining who will get in trouble with police and who will not. The study focused on 27,000 people in Philadelphia who were born in 1958.

“The focus I used was on career criminals, the chronic offenders,” Tracy said.

The studies are being done in other countries such as China and possibly Japan to show that certain criminal behavior “cuts across cultures, cuts across society, and it’s not just America that has the problem.”

Tracy said the main problem with the theory of crowd contagion is that it fails to explain how a mob originates and why some people commit attacks and some do not. Tracy said people never lose the ability to choose.

“They would have to be making a choice because of the difficulty that people have in engaging in an activity that is injurious to another human being,” Tracy said. “One has to make that choice.

“Some people have a predisposition to be violent and to be agitators and others aren’t,” he said.

The criminologist said people predisposed to crime learn to “overcome certain internal controls” and deny that they are hurting a victim. They later blame the victim for being in a position that allows the attacker to hurt them, Tracy said.

Morales testified Thursday that the seeds of mob mentality lie in feelings of frustration and hopelessness, which are rampant in minority communities.

When a powerful emotion erupts, the crowd is caught up in a mood reinforced by each person on the other, and they begin to act almost in unison, Morales said.

That view, the defense hopes, will convince a jury that Williams and Watson could not have formed the intent or premeditation to commit the most serious charges against them. Those counts could send the men to prison for life.

Final arguments are expected to begin Monday, and the jury could receive the case by midweek, according to attorneys on both sides.