how would police/homicide dectives react to an irl jessica fletcher type ?

In My Humble Opinion
1

weve been watching murder she wrote again and ive noticed the police recation differs … sometimes they tell her to get lost and sometimes they outright ask for help of course being a famous writer and later criminologist helped out

Some people say shed be banned from anything crime related (although I don’t know howd they do it because she was directly involved in most of them) but others point out police forces like the la and ny pds have paid consultants around all the time …

anyone have a clue ?

2

Since the OP is looking for opinions, let’s move this from GQ to IMHO.

samclem, moderator

3

It would probably depend on how desperate the police were. There are plenty of news stories about police forces using psychics and the like to try to solve crimes.

One possibility, unpleasant for such a person, is that he would make himself a suspect. I don’t know how likely it is–this may be more a trope in fiction than in real-life–but there seems to be a school of thought that anybody who seems to know anything at all about the crime is automatically deemed a suspect, because “they know more than they should.”

Actually, you can see that suspicion in a few of the Murder, She Wrote episodes. I’m currently watching the show on Netflix.

4

Everywhere this woman goes, someone gets murdered - with a frequency of about once a week. And she likes writing about murder. Don’t you think that’s a bit suspicious?

5

Yeah I’d say they’d arrest her pretty quick. Woman makes career out of writing about murders which she is personally involved in and always manages to be the one to figure out who did it.

6

I’ve got my eye on that Belgian chap too.

7

This was the premise for Psych. He [Shawn] could solve all the crimes so much faster than the police that eventually, after getting arrested for being a suspect in the first episode (because he knew too much) and a few other setbacks the police finally decided that however he’s doing it, he’s clearly doing something right so they brought him on as a paid consultant.
And, like the OP, sometimes they called him, sometimes he just happened to be right there and they practically had to remove him from the crime scene, but in the end, it was usually him and his partner Jazz Hands that solved the case.

8

I remember this happening in relation with a child murder case in France (like 30 years ago). A psychic was arrested and detained for having correctly guessed where the body was eventually found in a wood long away from the child’s home (hence a non-obvious place). The police hadn’t requested her help, and the body wasn’t even discovered because of her tip, she only had sent a letter to the family.

9

I’ve been a cop for almost 20 years and I’ve been around a half a dozen murders. She’s been involved in over 260 murders that we know about. Coincidence? I think not.

10

To answer the OP, Ms Fletcher has nothing to offer and much to hinder a real investigation. Murders are not genteel affairs. They are not solved by the style of reasoning advanced in Agatha Christie novels, or anything like it.

But even if they were, in order for her services to be at all useful, the real police would have to expose her to the entirety of the product generated by the investigation (since the standard trope of the Christie genre stresses the importance of the “tiny overlooked detail”, and drawing connections others have missed.) This is not trivial - any major investigation has an incident room (by whatever name) that is staffed by a substantial number of people to coordinate and manage all the huge inward information flow from moment to moment. And these things are set up so that even though individual police might sleep, the process doesn’t.

Managing information is a large part of the investigative process in murders, and having her in the loop soaks up resources. Police stage, for good operational reasons, who they speak to and the order in which they do. Ms Fletcher’s method seems to cut across that entirely, involving her conducting her own interviews with witnesses unrecorded and unsupervised, whenever she feels like it, with no thought about who the police might have under surveillance, etc or who they might or might not be letting in on who is in the frame.

In short, professional investigations are designed to be disciplined, focused, carefully managed affairs, and Fletcher can contribute nothing but chaos.

I would add one further point-someone above mentioned news stories about psychics. Most of those, of course, are generated by the psychics themselves, with no necessary relationship to the truth. Sometimes, families of victims try to press police, for whatever reason, to use a psychic. Police then have a difficult conversation to surf. The family’s perspective is that it can do no harm, so why not try? It might work. The police perspective is that it will plainly not work, and will have a cost in resources being distracted from real work, and a cost in credibility down the track at any trial. Attempts by the police at not being too confrontational are then distorted by the self - interested into claims that the police were enthusiastic supporters of the psychic.

TL;DR answer: “Your offer is most kind Mrs Fletcher, but we don’t engage amateur detectives. We have plenty of our own professional ones.”

11

For a different twist on the same general question–
I assume that a real-life Sherlock Holmes would be treated with the same suspicion, etc. But what about Mycroft Holmes? Here’s a man who doesn’t get in the way of the police – indeed, he hardly sets foot outside his house. He’s not going to mess up the official investigation by interviewing people or collecting evidence.

And yet he has such a tremendously powerful brain, that he can solve crimes anyway, just by cold logic and reason.

12

The real question is, if the detective is so good at solving crimes, why don’t they become police themselves?

13

They probably don’t want to be inhibited by the rules, regulations, restrictions, organizational culture, legal this-or-that, etc.
You might as well ask why Batman doesn’t join Gotham City’s SWAT team.

14

They might have some sort of physical or psychological impairment.

I know little about Mycroft Holmes, but Sherlock Holmes used drugs. (That might not have disqualified him from being a police officer at the time, but it would certain disqualify him today.)

There are private detectives in real life. If the police find them questioning witnesses and picking up (and hiding!) evidence, what do they do? I’m sure there would be obstruction of justice charges, but now there’s tainted witnesses and tainted or unusable evidence.

15

They ring the doorbell of the old brownstone on West 35th Street, and when Archie lets them in they storm into the office, park their broad rear ends in the big red leather chair, put a cigar in their mouth (but never light it), point a finger across the desk, and say “Goddam it, Wolfe!”

16

You don’t mean…

…She’s a Bidicidal Maniac…? :eek:

17

The Doyle Mycroft is an extreme agoraphobic. He’s both smarter and nuttier than his brother.

18

I watched a documentary about a missing person investigation on the ID channel, where the police humored a family member by talking to a psychic the family had already paid. The psychic said several things, two of which were that the missing woman had left town, and was with a man. There were maybe five points altogether. They were all banal things along the same lines.

The police officer who narrated the segment about the psychic said something like “Everything the psychic said could be true, but none of it had any investigative value, because it was too vague. It didn’t generate any leads, and some of it we’d already surmised anyway, such as her having left the city.”

The psychic reading sounded like a cold reading to me. IIRC, everything she said could have been true whether or not the woman was eventually found dead or alive.

19

To those who were wondering if Mycroft would be any good, since he just uses his “cold, logical brain”, someone has to put him in the loop. Real investigations are an information firehose. Dozens of police door knocking the neighbours, dozens identifying and collecting CCTV camera recordings, watching hours of footage, dealing with incoming calls from the public who heard that Betty had said that Fred wasn’t home that night.

Managing and distilling the firehose and sending the information up the line is a Systems issue, not a logic or an intelligence issue. They build in review processes so some underling’s missing something doesn’t wipe out the investigation. The logical, intelligent Mycroft would say “set up a system” just like we do already. One mind can’t do it alone.

There are 4 key problems with the enchanting idea that a brilliant amateur can do stuff the police can’t.

The first is that the process is not one of coldly logical deduction, as endless shows have trained us to think. It is called abduction (nothing to do with kidnapping) and it essentially means playing the odds. Google the concept. The notion that only the exceptional eccentric genius can do it is silly. Police are not the stupid plods this genre has to assume them to be.

The second is that fiction is populated with a finite number of “Clues”. The Chekhov’s Gun principle requires that each fact mentioned can have only a binary significance. It must be a Clue, or a Red Herring. If the writer tells us a Gaulois cigarette butt was found, then it can be nothing other than a clue to the offender, or a misdirection by the offender to cast blame on someone else. In a real investigation, the world is populated by random shit for the most part. Random cigarette butts left by someone who has nothing to do with it, random baseball cap blown in by the wind, and so on. The is no God-like author to predigest all of this into Clues for the police.

Third, remember that in the case of the vast majority of murders, it is pretty clear from the outset who did it. The argument is whether it was self-defence or provocation or the like. In many of these cases, the offender bolts, so the investigation is more about finding where the suspect is physically located.
Finally, there is no battle of wits between the detective and the offender. The criminal, no matter how smart, has to act in real time with imperfect information, and has to take a series of significant risks the outcome of each of which is not foreseeable. The police do not have to act in real time, and can take as long as they want to unpick all the bad decisions from the good ones made by the crim. The crim can only guess that the couple in the house next door are asleep, that there is no log in the security system of which he is unaware, and trying too hard to find out in advance is itself incriminating. As an example, a local criminal was found googling “pleading the fifth” on the night his wife disappeared, in circumstances where he was trying to say he had no idea what happened to her.

I would leave with a slightly tangential observation on a point someone made above, that perhaps Mycroft might not like stifling police procedures. Those procedures exist for a reason. The point of investigations is not to persuade the investigator, it is to persuade a jury, and all the detail of recording and paper trail confirmation is designed with that in mind. Anyone who does not get that does not have their head in the right place to be anywhere near investigations.

TD;DR. This genre of entertainment is undoubtedly appealing, but for reasons that have nothing to do with its closeness to reality. It is at its heart Scoobie-Doo for grown-ups.

20

Truly. About halfway through the first season of Longmire I suddenly observed just how dangerous Absaroka county is. I mean, you’ve got a county with at most 5,000 people in it and there’s a body turning up about once a week. And the week there’s no body, there are two the next!