There is a long history of people trying to solve crimes by appealing to supernatural and spiritual powers. That continues today with "psychic detectives," people who claim to be able to use psychic powers to discover the location of missing people or the perpetrators of certain crimes. Although psychic detectives make dramatic claims on behalf of themselves and often offer their services to the police, very few police departments ever actually make use of them.
Testing Psychic Detectives
Efforts to discover whether or not psychic detectives can do what they claim have indicated that there is little or nothing there. Martin Reiser, former Director of Behavioral Services for the Los Angeles Police Department, published the results of his own research in the Journal of Police Science and Administration in 1979. According to Reiser, alleged psychics performed no better than chance and he concluded that "the usefulness of psychics as an aid in criminal investigation has not been validated."
In 1986, the chief of the Dallas Police Department's homicide division reached a similar conclusion, stating:
"Not one time, one clue, or one piece of evidence or information from a psychic ever helped our investigations. Our experience has been that the only thing psychics do...is to take advantage of the emotions of the families."
Are Psychic Detectives Honest?
How is it, then, that these psychic detectives appear to have such amazing powers and appear to be able to do so much? For one thing, many of the alleged successes of these detectives are simply false - they just never happened. Some of this may be due to faulty recollection and selective memories, but some is due to fraud and lying.
For example, one of the most famous psychic detectives was Peter Hurkos, a Dutch man who claimed to have developed psychic abilities after falling off of a ladder. He claimed to have uncovered the identity of the Boston Strangler, although in truth he identified the wrong man - not that this stopped his self-promotion. He had also claimed earlier to have found the Stone of Scone, stolen from Westminster Abbey in 1950. According to Scotland Yard, however, he was of absolutely no help whatsoever.
A second factor is that so-called psychic detectives may simply be decent detectives, without psychic powers at all. By carefully studying newspaper reports and other sources of information about a crime, it is possible for a good observer to reach reasonable conclusions about events just like the police do.
It is not unusual for such psychics to provide information to the police which they had already developed on their own. This, of course, would only qualify them as a detective - not a psychic detective. Most of the time, however, these people do not even qualify as being that much.
It is also not unusual for the psychics to provide nothing more than vague generalities. When a lot of vague predictions are made, it is easy for one or more of them to end up being correct, thus allowing the psychic to claim a "victory."
Media gullibility can also play a significant role in the promotion of the belief that psychic detectives actually accomplish anything. A psychic who can actually solve crimes is "news," whereas the revelation that the psychic never did anything is boring and rarely if ever merits inclusion in the story. Reporters who bother to do just a bit of research with some follow-up calls would find that the claims made by and on behalf of these psychics simply don't pan out; that reporters fail to do so is an abdication of their responsibility to the public and to the community.
Are Psychic Detectives Cause Real Harm
There seems to be little question that most psychic detectives are completely sincere in their desire to help other people. Very often they do not ask for payment for what they do and offer their services free of charge. This does not, however, mean that they do not cause any harm.
Sometimes they will tell desperate parents that their children are dead, lying in water or buried in a forest somewhere. This is not always true, and telling a parent that their child has died when there is no good evidence of that fact is cruel in the extreme, whatever the intentions of the so-called psychic.
Also, information from a psychic can lead police in the wrong direction - for example, when searching for a body. Claims by a psychic may energize and encourage such searchers, but that does no good if they are off searching in the wrong place. Psychics can waste police resources by getting them to revisit a place which has already been searched or by getting them to revisit issues which have already been settled.
Psychics can also cause harm by claiming that the wrong people are guilty of a crime committed by someone else. For example, William J. Finch was a psychic who implicated the innocent owner of a gas station in a murder. The police had cleared him, but if the public had believed such outrageous allegations, the owner might have come to harm.
