I love Jon Ronson.

Ron Rosenbaum and Malcolm Gladwell have both also written interesting articles in the same general "profiling-as-cold-reading" genre.

I was just looking up the Gladwell piece because it's striking how very similar the opening paragraphs are to this Ronson piece.

Bit of a ... swipe ... there.

Despite the plunge in professional reputation, profiling continues to be featured in popular media, such as the UK's Wire in the Blood (soon to be adapted by CBS, apparently).

I suppose a broader, related question is the whole hollowness of forensic science generally, like whether it's actually true that no fingerprint is identical with any other, and the abstruse statistical likelihood arguments that DNA experts broach with juries. "One in ten trillion ..." What does that actually mean?

"Spending your life literally in the entrails of some poor soul..." What a shitty job. And how do you breath? SCUBA?

Fiction seriously misleads people as to the reality of how criminal prosecution comes about. 95% of cases that go to prosecution require no detective work to speak of. A witness lays the whole case out for the police, who often have no idea that a crime has been committed. It's when the case doesn't fall into their laps that the cops flounder around. Because they have very little constraint against lying or faking evidence, this is the most common fall back. Think Richard Jewel and Mark Hatfield as to very high profile examples of how investigations are fabricated out of thin air.

The rare cases of scientific detection, such as those detailed in John McPhee's "The Gravel Page," are notable because of their rarity, not because they provide a widely adopted model for investigation. In most instances where witness are lacking, but forensic evidence exists, lab work is rarely done and wide-scale canvassing for witnesses hardly ever happens. The cases that get wide publicity are usually anomalous and the norm is to ignore a case that would require hard work or scarce resources.

A snitch in time saves nine.