I parsed that as meaning that psychics almost never offer their services, or that law enforcement almost never accepts. On the rare occasion when they do, of course, the “assistance” is worthless, but they do at least occasionally receive and accept the offer. It’s like the song says: “Some kinds of help are the kind of help that helping’s all about, and some kinds of help are the kind of help we all can do without”.
Psychics still frequently make public declarations or predictions about UNSUBS, whether the police actually pay them any mind or not. My point was that they don’t need the subject present to cold read.
Actually, in reality, psychic “assistance” goes in the same folder with random nutjobs who claim responsibility for Hurricane Katrina, and similar crazy talk. No D.A. would ever present any psychic tip as factual evidence, since it cannot help, and would likely harm, the potential for future prosecution.
So what would “warm” be? Minimal advance information?
Clearly it is. The fake assistance you think (fake-) happens all the time doesn’t happen all the time, not even fake-happen. See?
Got a cite for that?
Slee
Show me a single example of a crime ever being solved by profiling.
If psychology cannot reliably predict human behavior, then how does cold reading itself work in the first place? Don’t cold reading and other confidence games exploit certain flaws in human psychology that are found in a large percentage of the population?
I’m not aware that criminal profiling is ever conducted in the serious belief that they’ll “find the killer.” While they do go through the motions and brief the investigators, good profilers know that their usefulness, if any, will come at the end of the case, when the profile can be used as circumstantial evidence during trial. That’s my impression, anyway.
I don’t place criminal profiling on the same level as astrology- rather, I think profiling by a competent psychologist can provide some useful guidelines.
ALL of us “profile,” and in many professions, that’s a useful skill. A salesman learns from experience how to tell the people who are really looking to buy from those who are just browsing, a waitress learns to tell which patrons will tip more if she flirts a little, a criminal lawyer learns to tell which witnesses he needs to badger and which ones he needs to charm. There are certain traits, cues and signals we all give off and people judge us (“profile” us) on them all the time.
That CAN be a useful tool. The problem comes when we get too enamored of our own cleverness, and when we start to think of useful generalities as hard science.
It may be useful to know that 94% of serial arsonists are white males in their twenties (psst- I made that up! I have no idea what the actual percentage is!)… but if all the tangible evidence points to a Hispanic female in her Fifties, it would be STUPID to rule her out as a suspect just because she doesn’t fit a profile. But that DOES happen. To use an example I’ve used before, the Beltway Snipers eluded capture in part because law enforcement was wedded to the notion that the killer was a white loner, whcih meant no one paid attention to a suspicious looking pair of black men.
A profile may be useful to cops who already have some leads, evidence and suspects. But it’s foolish and dangerous to START with a profile and then try to make the evidence and suspects fit that profile.
Diogenes, you’re the one who claimed that criminal profilers are no more successful than self-proclaimed psychics. I think it’s only fair to ask if you have a cite for that claim.
Personally, I don’t put much stock in criminal profilers either. This doesn’t necessarily mean that profilers perform no better than those who claim to have psychic abilities. If you’re going to make that specific claim, then it’s only fair to ask if you have a citation for it.
Unless, of course, you think that people must always assume that Diogenes the Cynic is correct by default. Do you?
My cite is that they’ve never solved a crime.
Do you have a cite for that claim? If not, then you’re engaging in circular reasoning.
How am I supposed to cite a negative? It should be pretty easy to prove me wrong.
I’m not trying to prove you wrong. As I specifically said, I don’t put much stock in criminal profiling either.
I am, however, asking you to substantiate your own claim. Or is this yet another case in which you simply assumed some tenet to be true, and then challenged other people to prove you wrong?
Mya claim is substantiated by the fact that criminal profiling has never solved a crime. Your request for a cite is bizarre. How do you cite that something has never happened?
Why, by listing every single crime in the history of the world that they didn’t solve, of course.
If you decide to take this course, please do so off-site, and provide a link-the SDMB doesn’t have the hard drive space for such a silly endeavor.
If I made the claim that there are no black mice in the world, which would make more sense:
- I should be made to show you all the mice in the world to prove my point, or
- Someone who disagrees with my theory should produce a single black mouse?
I think Ian covered this pretty well. If the cops have five suspects and one of them fits the profile, then they might spend more time/attention on that one; they wouldn’t ignore the other four. And I can’t imagine that profiling would hold up as circumstantial evidence. Anyone offering evidence that “In 95% of such cases, the perpetrator is a black teenager” would be used by the other side as saying that the remaining 5% is “reasonable doubt.”
Let’s see a cite that pretty much everybody has an IQ over 105.
Regards,
Shodan