THERE is a particularly disturbing photo of a Japanese soldier in World War II with a baby in the air at the end of a bayonet attached to his rifle. He had just used his weapon to kill the baby.

This was not a gangster or a serial killer. This was a man in uniform serving his country. What was even more horrifying was that this activity was not unusual for Japanese soldiers in World War II. They frequently practised killing with a bayonet on Chinese civilian prisoners.

Before you start to think that this was an Asian thing, let me stop you. The Germans were just as brutal and inhumane in their treatment of Jews, Russians, gypsies, and all minorities — to the point of attempting extermination.

If you think that cruelty like this could never occur with North American armies, well forget it. Research what an American army did to babies, women, and old men in a village called My Lai in the Vietnam War, when many of my readers were alive, some even adults, in 1968.

War, some would say, brings out senseless violence from relatively normal people. To be fair, neither the Germans nor the Japanese have demonstrated that level of inhumanity since then, so it could be a war thing, or their peace could just be the humbling experience of two atomic bombs and carpet bombing.

At the heart of it, violence like this occurs when you no longer value the life of someone else. This could be caused by racism or other prejudices that allow you to become insensitive to human suffering, and in fact, human life, because they seem different. This doesn’t only occur in times of war, but also in countries where there is no armed conflict taking place.

Let me tell you a little story about a gang from a squatter settlement in Gregory Park called Mexico. One day on foot patrol through Mexico a man with a gun, quite visible, ran away from us. We pursued him but never caught him. He left behind his smartphone. It wasn’t locked, and as part of my investigation into the offence of “possession of a prohibited weapon”, I read his dropped phone conversation for clues to his whereabouts.

I came upon a WhatsApp conversation with a fellow gang member. This gang member was rebuking the other gangster that the man he killed was a madman, so he didn’t really “mek a duppy”, he needed to, in fact, kill a “normal” person.

As I dug further I did, in fact, see them discussing further how they killed the madman and threw him in a hole. I knew both of these young men. I also knew the mentally ill man. I couldn’t fathom why they would do something like this; what turned them into “monsters”?

I thought of poverty. Mexico is really a squatter settlement with nothing; this was for the poorest of the poor. No water, no electricity, no sewerage. Nobody who lived there could afford the guns that these young men carried and used.

The gunmen were an offshoot of the Gaza gang. They had been created because of a split in the Gulf gang that is located nearby.

The mentally ill man had no part in this conflict between a career criminal and a man who could “rap and rhyme”. Yet the gang created by the conflict killed him for no reason at all other than to give one of their members the ability to say, “I mek a duppy.”

What creates or converts virtual teenagers into monsters? If it is poverty, then why is it that it took Gaza arms and money? Maybe the poverty makes you vulnerable because you have nothing, someone comes and gives you a gun, and that makes you important?

So why is it that only a handful of youth adopted values far below those of an animal? Why did so many flee the community rather than join the predators who were destroying it?

Decency is common, even in the face of abject poverty. So if war created the Japanese and German murderers, what created those killers in Mexico in Gregory Park? I think the criminal-family association creates the close-quarters influences that helped to create young men who are capable of becoming killers.

None of them came from strong families. Needless to say, their families were, in fact, poor. The gang provides the structure and, by extension, the value system. This is similar to how politicians helped to convert normal young men into killers in the 70s. Provide structure, strength in numbers, weapons, and the average young man who lacks the family structure will adapt to the values of the gang.

That is similar to how soldiers adapt to the values of the group, hence allowing them to kill innocent people, even babies, like monsters. Whereas I honestly believe that the Japanese and German governments in World War II encouraged slaughter and cruelty, I cannot see the logic of gang leadership encouraging random cruelty without any logical benefit.

Yet it is evident that they did. We all watched those videos showing the beating to death of a man that resulted in a murder trial. Rationally speaking, this makes no sense. If you wanted to kill him, why not shoot him? The answer is that gangs are, in essence, evil. Gangs only exist for the purpose of achieving something through force or violence.

Exposure to and participation in violence and killing, whether in war or in normal times, creates the same monster who will kill for entertainment.

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