If, like me, you are addicted to American crime fiction, or Crash-Bang-Wallops as I call them, or if, like the little 'Memsahib', you enjoy crime drama on the 'telly', then you will be aware of that ubiquitous character who now seems to have a part, if not the leading part, in every crime story - the criminal profiler. I have always gone along with the concept - in books and films, that is - because, of course, I suspend belief. However, watching them on the 'telly' makes it that much harder to overcome my inbuilt scepticism. I realise that these days, with our quaint, old-fashioned belief in psycho-analysis, such practitioners are used in real life by the police forces of the world, well, the English-speaking world, that is. In such cases I just hope the perp has dropped a ton of DNA because I have always suspected that you would catch a cold quicker than you'd catch a villain using profiler techniques.
So, the other day I was happy to have my cynicism confirmed by an essay in the New Yorker - how appropriate, New York, the spiritual home of gangsters and psycho-analytical quacks! Written by Malcolm Gladwell it tells of the infancy of criminal profiling in the 1950s when New York's Finest were under huge pressure to catch a repeat bomber who had started his campaign in the '40s. In desperation, and, boy, they must have been desperate, they approached James Brussel who was - yes, you guessed - a psychiatrist, and a Freudian, to boot! Anyway, from there the whole thing boomed and bloomed with the FBI spending huge amounts on setting up a profiling centre at Quantico. Gladwell, with the precision of a brain surgeon deftly wields his scalpel to expose the whole exercise as being akin to astrology and soothsaying.
So, that's one down, next ... Anthropogenic Global Warming!
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