A diligent student of anti-social behaviour rapidly pinpoints Justin Bieber’s antics as formula stuff.  You could have seen this too-rich kid’s freefall coming a mile away. There’s a contrived aura to it all, as though some image expert had handed the adolescent singer a to-do list of surefire bad boy actions that would land a stream of front pages and build a bigger fan base.  But, when you look at the trajectory, certain behaviorists would peg it on a known pattern of door-opening gateway crimes like littering and spitting leading to progressively more severe anti-social acts.

With Bieber we went from spitting, to paparazzi punching, on to allegedly egging a neighbouring mansion, also drinking and driving, over-self-medicating, then street racing in an irresponsible fashion.  That nice-boy façade was wearing a little thin.  Time to spice things up for enhanced commercial success.  Pick up popularity with male followers perhaps.

More publicity means J.B. (not Jail Bird) stands to receive even more money from royalties and record sales, inflating his sense of power and fueling more out-of-control conduct.

When he spit off a Toronto hotel balcony as a gift to fans standing below he was handing the world a business card to his maladjustment profile.  Other anti-social incidents would follow, predictably.

An ongoing study by four major US business schools examines the factors governing inflated feelings of power and entitlement and their relationship to lawbreaking and rule breaking.  It points to physical space and body stances as key factors in triggering chemical changes in the body that mark a Type A aggressive personality.

Bieber’s big cars, big house, big money, big moves, apparently all factors in his slide from grace. 

Litter often gets no respect. How encouraging it was to see Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson bring littering to the forefront in his state of the city address last week. Contrast this to Toronto’s mayor --  you know, the guy observed by police to have littered a public park with juice cartons and a liquor bottle, the guy soon to be known as the mayor formerly known as Rob Ford.

Jim Watson, who ushered in an interesting bin experiment on central Elgin Street this year, expresses fatigue over the sight of litter and poor recycling habits. (The two are interlinked.)  In his speech he called on compatriots to improve their recycling practices and pledged more bins and innovation to reduce the rate of littering.

Watson, in my view, proves that no mayor who litters should be mayor.  Real leadership starts with who we are at the core.  A person with littering at his core travels an anti-social path of behaviours that could escalate, according to experts who study anti-social crimes and make a link between littering and other forms of deviance.

Two high profile cases of late – one being Mr. Ford’s, and the other, the metamorphosis of Justin Bieber, who has grown from spewing his spit mucous over an upscale Toronto hotel balcony earlier this year to egging houses, public street racing and impairment in the past few months.

For Ford, on the other hand, his “gateway crime” of littering is an indicator of his love of underbelly associations with fellow crack cocaine users and dealers and his unyielding passion for alcoholic beverages, including whilst driving.

If you litter your city, you can’t be the face for clean-ups.  You don’t belong in the staged photo-ops, where you put down your work gloves as soon as the cameras leave.  You can’t speak intelligently about littering because, clearly, you don’t get it if you are wanton with your discarded waste.  You can’t be trusted as a lawmaker. 

Littering is the lowest rung on a long ladder of criminality.  Ottawa’s Jim Watson understands this and will focus his attention on it, he says.  By contrast, Ford stumbles along blindly, carelessly littering beautiful Toronto as he goes, stupefied.