Mark Hoffman: The detective who investigated the crimes he committed himself

The last scene of Saw 3D (Kevin Greutert, 2010) takes the saga back to the filthy bathroom where it all began. Figures in pig masks overpower Detective Mark Hoffman, sedate him and chain him to a pipe. When he wakes, Dr Lawrence Gordon, the first film’s survivor and Jigsaw’s secret collaborator, takes away the hacksaw Hoffman was reaching for, throws it out of the room, switches off the light and says “Game over” before shutting the door. Hoffman is left screaming in the dark. It is the end of a man who, over four films, had played with an advantage no other killer in the saga ever had: he carried the badge of the department hunting Jigsaw. He began by killing Seth Baxter, his sister’s murderer, and dressing the crime up as Jigsaw’s work; Jigsaw discovered the imitation and made him his accomplice; with the master dead, Hoffman went on killing from inside the investigation. Daniel Glaser’s differential anticipation helps explain why a policeman dares so much: what decides a crime is what the offender expects to gain and to risk, and Hoffman expected to risk very little.

// The theoryCrime as expectation

The sociologist Daniel Glaser formulated differential anticipation theory in Crime in Our Changing Society (1978), integrating ideas from social learning and rational choice. According to Glaser, a person commits a crime when they expect to get more satisfaction from it than from lawful alternatives. Those expectations are not a cold calculation but are formed from three elements: social ties, which make losing one’s reputation more or less costly; prior learning, which teaches techniques and justifications; and the perception of opportunities and risks. What matters is what the person anticipates, not what will actually happen.

// The subjectThe disciple without a doctrine

Hoffman does not share Jigsaw’s philosophy. For Jigsaw, the traps were a test; for Hoffman, they are a method for killing without leaving a trace. He is cold, methodical and increasingly violent as he is cornered. What sets him apart is the use of his position: his badge is his best weapon. The saga turns him into a portrait of the corrupt policeman taken to the extreme: someone who uses authority, information and his colleagues’ trust to commit the very crimes he is supposed to investigate.

Saw V (David Hackl, 2008) is Hoffman’s film, and the one that best shows his expectation of impunity growing. It opens with the pendulum trap in which he kills Seth and moves on to a promotion: after Jigsaw’s death, the department treats him as the hero who saved a little girl, Corbett Denlon, and at the ceremony he declares that justice is the backbone of every peaceful society. Meanwhile FBI agent Peter Strahm suspects that Jigsaw had an accomplice other than Amanda and starts pulling at the thread. Hoffman does not run. He sets a trap, and Strahm dies crushed in a room whose walls close in, which leaves Hoffman a perfect corpse to pin the blame on. In one of the flashbacks, Hoffman admits to John that he did not expect to feel remorse. Glaser would say that guilt was a cost his calculation had not foreseen, and that each unpunished crime wore it down. By the end of the saga, the risk Hoffman anticipates no longer comes from the police: it comes from Jigsaw’s circle, starting with Jill Tuck, who tries to turn him in, and ending with Gordon.

// The crackExpectations are hard to measure

Glaser’s theory has a practical difficulty: a person’s expectations are hard to measure, and they are usually inferred from their behavior, which makes the explanation somewhat circular. If Hoffman offends, he expected to gain; if he did not, he did not expect to.

Hoffman’s case also shows a factor the theory treats only in passing: institutional position. It is not only that he calculates well, but that the system has given him a power no one watches. That is not a question of individual expectations but of oversight of the police.