It appears all the calls were the result of one man, a prison guard/police officer wannabe.
It's amazing, sad and disturbing what people will do when confronted by a person they perceive to be in a position of authority.
The newspaper article mentions the The Milgram Experiment where volunteers were instructed to administer electric shocks to a person who failed to answer questions correctly on a test. About 2/3 of the participants went along with what the person in authority told them to do and in one replication of the study over 80 percent of the people administered shocks they thought were lethal to the victim.
From the article -
"Milgram died in 1984, but his biographer and protege, Dr. Thomas Blass, said in an interview that the behavior of the people duped in the strip-search hoaxes would not have surprised him."
"Once you accept another person's authority, you become a different person," Blass said. "You are concerned with how well you follow out your orders, rather than whether it is right or wrong."
Anyone who puts themself in a place where unquestioning obedience to authority is held paramont would do well to study and take heed to the results of this experiment. It isn't much of a stretch to consider how some of the totally dysfunctional things that flow through/down management chains come to be, when you take into account what some of us will do if told by the "right" person.
