The mind of a murderer: the power and limits of forensic psychiatry
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Their latest video is of the Parkland mass shooter.
Once I finished their YouTube videos their Patreon had a few more: https://www.patreon.com/jimcantswim
The series is very good, and it reminds me why I am glad to live in New Zealand - where most of my interactions with the police have been pleasant (being middle class white guy may help there). I saw a policeman with a sidearm the other day, which was very surprising to me (they don’t usually carry, although I think they mostly now do have a shotgun locked in the boot of the patrol car).
I watched them too. They're surprising.
You don't need this. "IANAL" was just a (partly tongue-in-cheek) way to provide context so people didn't mistake a poster for a legal expert if they're writing with an otherwise authoritative tone, but really that's just assumed unless stated otherwise, and "I am not your lawyer" is part of a common disclaimer by actual lawyers to make it 1000% clear that they're not providing legal advice in their official capacity and so creating a lawyer/client relationship, when posting their opinions online. No part of this is even maybe needed if you're not a lawyer, and even the "I am not your lawyer" thing is probably an example of excessive ass-covering (but the law's all about that, so, no surprise there)
Really similar to how language evolves generally, through misunderstandings or misappropriated terms that come to actually mean the thing they were initially mistaken to mean (possibly losing the original sense entirely, sooner or later), except that in this case it's not actually signifying anything. Just a linguistic tic.
I'm in agreement. One minor example, for as much as anyone thinks the Hippocratic Oath has worth - let's be honest, this is HN, there is sure to be a spectrum of opinions - psychologists are NOT required to swear it.
(Modern Osteopathy Schools are basically medical schools, usually for people who didn't get a spot in a med school. Are they as prestigious, or fancy--no, but the graduate can prescribe, and do surgery.)
Yes, that is the point.
> As a side note it was fascinating that multiple times, interrogators lied about realtime, see through walls, global satellite coverage and not once did a suspect question that ability.
An interrogator can lie about what evidence they have, and yes some interrogators in the JCS videos overdo this in a way that's likely abusive. It can however be strategically beneficial to the innocent if done lightly and with proper foreknowledge, because if you can precisely and vigorously call the interrogator's BS about what evidence they do or do not have, this sets you apart from someone who's just making stuff up as they go along and cannot possibly be able to do this.
It seems to be the opposite. This JCS video shows 100% non-guilty people being 100% truthful, and their truthful statements are regularly seen as further evidence of their criminality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BemHqUqcpI8
Whether you're completely guilty, partly guilty, or completely non-guilty, the safest thing to do is to say absolutely nothing.
>It can however be strategically beneficial to the innocent if done lightly and with proper foreknowledge, because if you can precisely and vigorously call the interrogator's BS about what evidence they do or do not have, this sets you apart from someone who's just making stuff up as they go along and cannot possibly be able to do this.
I really don't think this is true at all. Again, I think it's the complete opposite. I think it's total BS that trying to call BS about evidence would somehow help you in any way. Someone making stuff up as they go along can definitely very possibly do what you say, especially if they're relatively intelligent. And someone being 100% truthful may not be able to do this, if they think the police can't lie, and/or if they know nothing about forensics.
In any of the four scenarios (guilty and try to call them out; not guilty and try to call them out; guilty and don't try to call them out; not guilty and don't try to call them out), you're not going to help your case. The only thing that might come out of it is that you hurt your case. Either nothing happens in the best case, or you hurt yourself in the worst case. The expected value is negative.
It's helpful to know about these techniques, but you shouldn't be taking any action in response to them if you see them. You just have to wait for your lawyer.
Police are not trying to help you. They're looking for things to confirm your guilt. I would think the only thing you could say that might help you is if you have a provable alibi or some other evidence that exonerates you, but in that case the correct action is still always to say "I won't talk without a lawyer". You can give the evidence to your lawyer, who'll then evaluate it, and if they believe it's helpful they can present it to the police and prosecutor and try to get the charges dropped.
For example, while I do think the Parkland shooter was almost certainly heavily malingering - to the point of it being absurdly blatant - every single thing he did was interpreted and explained in the context of malingering. It's very possible those interpretations were all correct, but I feel like there was high confidence in all of the psychological explanations despite the confidence not always being warranted to such a high degree.
And I've seen similar high-confidence explanations about other people's psychologies and intentions at any given moment. This is kind of a mirror of the Reid technique in general:
>For example, Reid believed that "tells" such as fidgeting was a sign of lying, and more generally believed that trained police interrogators could intuitively check lies merely by how they were delivered. Later studies have shown no useful correlation between any sort of body movements such as breaking eye contact or fidgeting and truth-telling. While police can be effective at cracking lies, it is via gathering contradicting evidence; police officers have shown to be no better than average people at detecting lies merely from their delivery in studies.
In the videos, we know the suspects are guilty and lying, so it's easy to associate certain behavior with deception. And some do appear to genuinely just be terrible liars. But without the advantage of hindsight knowledge, it's easy to feel confident you see similar behavior in other people and extrapolate that they're lying without actually having any substantiated evidence that you're right or not.
There was a psychologist on TV who objected when someone said he had expertise with serial killers. He replied that nobody in psychology had expertise with serial killers, because there are simply too few serial killers who are in therapy.
The psychology of killers has a lot of allure but the way it's portrayed in the media (Silence of the Lambs, Criminal Minds, etc.) has little to do with reality.
There's some evidence that he didn't kill as many people as he claims, or work with the mob as he claims, but he's definitely a serial killer in any case.
I don't know if I agree or disagree, but I found this a spectacular sentence that really makes me think.