[conanbatt]

I read once that experienced detectives are worse at telling lies than rookies. The article theorized that old-timey detectives get very confident on their intuition and experience, so they assume they are right on a hunch sooner than rookies. The latter, unexperienced as they are,look harder at the facts and are more humble about guessing right or wrong.

There is something dangerous in believing you have the key to knowing when someone is lying or not: if you are confident someone is lying you are more likely to disregard facts or evidence, to justify your hunch.

Criminal profilers might qualify as experts in court, saying someone "fits the profile", helping the state make a case, while their profiling could be totally wrong, as it was in the famous sniper case, where they went with the classic "middle aged caucasian" and the killer was black and with his son(?) as an accomplice.

Even worse when you go through TSA, where the justifiable hunches are almost certainly ethnically biased.

I respect law enforcements developed intuition to know "something might be happening", but would never take that as more than a football player thinking he will score the next goal.

[justinreeves]

>Criminal profilers might qualify as experts in court, saying someone "fits the profile", helping the state make a case, while their profiling could be totally wrong, as it was in the famous sniper case, where they went with the classic "middle aged caucasian" and the killer was black and with his son(?) as an accomplice.

What case is this? Also, is "middle ages caucasian" some kind of trope in police investigations? I wasn't aware it was…

[whtrbt]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks

"It was widely speculated that a single sniper, initially identified as a white man with assumed military experience, was using the Interstate 495 Capital Beltway for travel, possibly in a white van or truck. It was later learned that the rampage was perpetrated by John Allen Muhammad, and a minor, Lee Boyd Malvo, then aged 17 and originally from Jamaica, driving a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice sedan."

[conanbatt]

It is for serial killers. They probably assume that because of statistics(most serial killers are white), and not a psychological profile.