I’ve been going through the Columbo catalog. Yes, Columbo is really cool, as police shows go. Also I was watching a bit of Red Dragon.
One common narrative is that some cops are special, and have this really precise intuition, which someone magically cuts through all the many details of the case and exactly hones in on the correct perpetrator, which is never without fail. I love Columbo, but FUCKKKK he’s so guilty of this. From minute ten of the episode, he’s knows who is the murderer and he’s just examining all the inconsistencies of the story until the murderer just confesses and goes to a life in prison without a fight. In Red Dragon, Ben Ed Norton’s character can just look at the crime scene photos and then the crime plays in his brain like a movie. I might be exaggerating slightly as I was bored of that film. Think Odo, who just knows when something illegal is going to go down.
I feel like many cop movies have this “special police intuition” trope going on.
It does upset me. If one’s ever gone dealt with the legal system in any way, cops are wrong AF. I think we’ve all experienced it when a cop makes a snap (lazy) judgement, follows through with their hunch out of sheer laziness and hubris, the cop builds a lazy ass case out of vibes, and then the innocent victim spends an inordinate amount of time and money trying to prove their innocence, if they’re even able to secure their innocence. Often many are stuck with the results of a 5 second cop hunch for the rest of their lives. Prosecutors and courts generally take the cops’ findings at their word.
In another venue, we’ve all tried fighting snap judgements is from admin on Twitter and 
. AFAIK, I’ve never seen an admin apologise or return a ban.
I feel like some podcast like Citations Needed or whatever covered this, but no amount of Googling led me to where this idea came from.
Being autistic, those youtube videos with names like “Former FBI body language expert shows you how to spot a liar” terrify me.
The most full-of-shit people I’ve ever met all had firm handshakes, an easy smile, and a steady gaze. They could make the predatory delight in their eyes when they discovered your vulnerabilities, look like tender compassion.
You spot liars by having investigated enough to know their claims don’t add up, but that is work, and an admission you aren’t gifted with the special cop intution.
Fuck yeah, I hate that pig body language “expert”. Oh, avoiding eye contact means you’re a liar? Go fuck yourself officer
Maybe I just don’t feel like gazing into the simultaneously glassy and hostile orbs of a pig who thinks I might be food, maybe I just don’t want that energy in my day
If you ever wanna watch an hour and a half long takedown of the “body language” grifters this video is great
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
You know what show never does this? House MD. It’s a detective show without cops, where the super cool genius misanthrope is actually just a loser and wrong all the time. House’s intuition is often wrong and makes things worse, and the same goes for other characters. And it has doctors instead of cops. Best detective show ever
Okay but it is worth pointing out that they present House as a super genius even though he is wrong all the time, like it’s not treated as a failure on his part that he just keeps saying sarcoidosis and paraneoplastic syndrome.
They also have several conversations in which they discuss medical ethics and they pretty much always reach the most fucked up conclusions about patient consent, the role of the doctor and the ethics of various treatments.
Edit: Like here are some of the conclusions reached by just Dr. Cameron (Who is treated as the moral center of the show for it’s early seasons) presented as correct.
1: It is good to lie about the benefit of medications if it’s to help an unrelated person.
2: Euthenasia is ok but only if the patient is a bad person and deserves to die therefore.
3: It’s not only okay to treat patients while stoned, but if you don’t feel bad about intervening then you’re a bad person.
4: If you’re a good enough doctor the rules no longer apply to you
5: Lying to a patients face to get what you want is ok.
6: Giving patients false hope is good because then they don’t feel as bad.
Basically every episode has a new and utterly fucked up conclusion reached about medical ethics reached by the cast. It’s the same as a police procedural on that front.
All true but it’s a show and it has to last 40 minutes so they can’t just figure it out right away. I feel like house has such a ridiculous premise that it’s basically a fantasy show and no doctor would ever say that they are like house or that doctors should be like house whereas cops on the other hand…
I feel I must remind you that cops will model themselves after The Punisher.
Oh yeah it is hilariously pro-medical abuse. Which obviously is extremely fucked up, the message is usually that you should let doctors do whatever they want to you because they know best and people who don’t consent to medical abuse are stupid and wrong. Which is bad
Pretty much. But also every medical drama treats the basic four bioethical principles the same way cop dramas treat the fourth amendment or defense lawyers
I’m almost always eventually right
-House
I’ve always said that Apothecary Diaries is also House MD in fictional ancient China.
Also inspired by Sherlock Holmes, funnily enough.
That’s really funny because Sherlock Holmes has dogshit methodology, Arthur Conan Doyle based him off one of his lecturers in medical school, and Arthur Conan Doyle was involved with the Spiritualists to the point that people have drawn connections between Spiritualists’ dogshit pseudoscientific reasoning and Sherlock Holmes’s horrible methodology. There’s a lot of crossover between early Spiritualism and what would become an entire industry of pseudoscientific charlatanism and quackery today.
Sherlock Holmes : detective work :: homeopathy : medicine
Lupus
If you got him as the attending doctor your health will be in jeopardy
It’s a cool trope when the detective is not a cop, which is where it originally started out in novels where a small private detective would be better at the job than the shitty cops.
It’s a shit trope that defends and supports cops when it’s a cop doing it.
tv has it as “not a cop” sometimes. Psych, Monk, that new show with Kaitlin Olson
Guess this goes back to Sherlock Holmes?
Guess this goes back to Sherlock Holmes?
Yeah I think so. I don’t know of any before that, although there very well might be Sherlock stories are what popularised and created the whole genre I’d bet.
Psych really just feels like they’re mocking the cops the whole time. Too bad it does a random uturn into severe transphobia at the end.
This is taken to its absurd extreme in Disco Elysium where Harry literally has supernatural intuition and his wild deviations from the case turn out to be relevant all the time to the extent that if you play a certain way you will genuinely earn Kim’s respect as a detective.
“police intuition” IRL is just
but no amount of Googling led me to where this idea came from.
Try searching for “copaganda”. It even has a wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaganda
Also, it’s interesting to listen to the old radio show “Dragnet”. It’s from the late 40s/early 50s, and you’ll recognize it follows the standard police procedural. THey’ve been doing the same shit for decades. Detective novels predate it, but it’s interesting to hear even the acting be so similar to the slop of today.
It’s a ripoff of Sherlock Holmes, who was the original “detective who solves crimes through pure logic and intuition.” It’s been copied, rehashed, and parodied so many times it has become the baseline for all crime solving media.
It’s similar to guns, where old westerns would have a crackshot gunslinger hero who could hit a dime at 100 yards with a pistol. Then villains started to be badasses who could also hit far away targets with incredible precision. But now everyone is this way, so later storytellers just assume it’s how guns work, meaning you have beat cops shooting guns out of people’s hands without anyone getting hurt.
Detective media fell down the same path with Sherlock Holmes’ intuition. It’s what makes the original character special. But then we need villains who can match that intellect. But then normal people are put on par with the villains, so now everyone is just like that and writers assume that’s how cops work. It’s “My dad can beat up your dad!” Goku vs. Superman powerlevel wank carried out through generations.
But wasn’t Sherlock Holmes less of a “cop’s intuition” kind of detective and way more pure robotic logic? “If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth”. He was the kind to collect evidence and then see what that leads to without preconceptions, beyond what he can hear and observe.
On the other hand, what OP is talking about are cops and detectives that have a feeling they know how is guilty due to instinct, experience, their gut, whatever you want to call it, and then do their best to track down evidence that proves that person is it. Columbo does this by picking up guilty vibes sometimes, I think they’ve done this in Brooklyn 99 where they have to prove someone did a crime and the tough part is proving it. This does happen in real life occasionally (I just read the book Killers of the Flower Moon, for example) but it also leads to cops relentlessly chasing the innocent too because the person has guilty vibes (i.e. They’re black or poor).
I think what you’re saying just means the Enlightenment values of Sherlock Holmes have been bastardized and vulgarized because thinking about deduction is too hard for the people who write procedurals now.
OK but Odo spends his free time morphed into a cup or wall panel in Quarks where he can just listen to shady shit going on.
Inspirational tbh
Ben Norton’s character
from acting in blockbusters to the Geopolitical Economy Report, you never know where life will take you!
I heard that his experience with American History X is what led him to move to China and critique US imperialism.
wait he lives in china ?
Lol sorry. I accidentally wrote Ben Norton (the name of a YouTuber) instead of Ed Norton (the name of an actor). That was a joke on my mistake.
I don’t know who ben notron is so I assumed it was Edward anyways
The only one i can think of off the top of my head that doesn’t do this is Fox Mulder. He can watch a person melt in front of him and he’d just go “where did they go?”
And it’s never an intuition for injustice in general, no, that would be “too political”. Rather, it’s the natural and inborn talent to know, when the very specific laws and regulations of your random moment in time, in the short lived society you happen to find yourself in, at a random little place on earth, are violated to a degree that warrants prosecution by the very legal body you just happened to sign on for. Who knew evolution worked fast enough to produce something so incredibly specific.
Seriously, the idea that something like this could exist just serves to naturalize unjust conditions and build hegemony for the ruling class.
If I remember correctly, Odo just has a lot of constables and informants all over the station
When he petitioned Sisko to grant him full access to the ship’s computers and private accounts, he had to be reminded that the Federation does not allow for that sort of behavior and he got all pouty about it
That and it probably doesn’t help that he just turns into lamps and vases to spy on people
You might be right, but I feel like Odo does a lot of hunches, and he’s never wrong. Except for the Things Past episode when he’s extremely wrong.
That’s kinda a thing though. Most murders are obvious and it is only though shoddy police work that they are hard to find. Like, appart from Columbo all the rich white businessmen that kill their wives in the 80s dp have a reasonable expectation to just get away with it. Police intuition is just actually looking into the case at all. Your average cop seems to have a flow chart that is somwthing like, find nearest marginal person to blame. So in that small pond any fish seems like magic
I remember watching that sex predator seagal cop show where he gets his Spidey sense moments in the show.
Camera blurs and everything. Its so ridiculous On a side note that clown kakarot does this several times its why I wasn’t murked, why frieza was spared, cell given a senzu, etc. Honestly a miracle earth hasn’t been atomised a dozen time off this gut feeling of a guy who thought marriage is a food. Usually the universe twists itself into pretzels to make these guys right
Ok to be fair to Odo he has only one culprit, Quark, and he watches him like a hawk by turning himself into an old Cheeto on the ground
