Psychic Detectives
Part 1: How Do They Help Police?
By Daniel Muniz

In cracking tough cases like unsolved murders, kidnappings, missing children, and in other such crimes, psychics often offer to use their extraordinary powers and their supernatural insight to converse with the dead and the living, probe the depths of heaven and hell, and predict future events as well as vividly seeing horrific events that have already happened in the past. So what kind of value do psychics really have for law enforcement?

How about absolutely nothing, like in zilch or nada.

Now that is a difficult premise to swallow because a whole slew of popular television and radio shows love to parade clairvoyants around on their programs. These hosts are often in stunned bewilderment while they are fawning all over the amazing abilities of psychics and marveling at their astounding accomplishments.

Admittedly, many clairvoyants do have incredible television personalities. Many of them are photogenic, charming, and loaded with charisma. But just like with a used car salesman, not everything that they say is exactly true regardless of how well they can say it on TV or on a radio show.

Part of the problem is that many programs, even on news cable channels, are nothing more than entertainment instead of solid journalism. So in other words, a lot of the claims made on television by psychics have not been verified or vetted by any news staff. In addition, these charlatans only go to talk shows that are sympathetic to them like Montel Williams, Larry King, Anderson Cooper, and others. And they are not about to go on programs where an investigative journalist will ask them some hard questions and point out all of their discrepancies.

As result, someone like the famous psychic detective Sylvia Browne can make ridiculously absurd and patently false claims about the huge number of crimes that she has personally solved and all the missing children that she has found. And talk show hosts like Montel Williams and Larry King will eat that stuff up while thinking of her achievements as the unvarnished truth. It is totally irrelevant that they have never scrutinized a shred of her gibberish or examined all of her predictions that didn’t come true.

And regardless of what psychics may state on television, most law enforcement agencies think that they are phonies and a waste of time.

For example, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is a branch of the Department of Justice, goes out of its way to loudly proclaim that they do not have any documented accounts whatsoever of someone being able to use their supernatural powers to locate a missing or lost child.

In addition, the FBI is just as adamant in saying that they don’t use psychics.

But amazingly, quite a number of local law enforcement agencies have also publicly stated that they in no way have ever consulted with or used the services of psychics even though psychics can go on so-and-so television show and say otherwise. Again, these television and radio talk shows that host these clairvoyants do not bother to verify anything because their programs are for entertainment purposes only instead of news.

Now haven’t any police departments ever used psychics?

Of course they have but many of them have been duped into wasting valuable time and expending precious resources on dragging rivers, draining ponds, digging up backyards, and searching desolate remote areas while having nothing to show for their efforts. And after getting burned when absolutely nothing turns up, those same law enforcement agencies now refuse to consult with clairvoyants for the future. But such failures have in no way stopped psychics from claiming that they have indeed worked for police and that have also actually solved crimes.

However, there are some cops that routinely use psychics, so what’s up with that?

The reason is because they do so for their own nefarious reasons.

For example, the police already know that lie detector tests are totally bogus and that they are inadmissible as evidence in a court of law, but they use them anyways. Its purpose is for theatrics as well as to artfully mislead and misdirect suspects into thinking that because of this machine, the police now know more of what really happened. The same exact thing works with psychics. If a suspect or witness is superstitious, then the cops can haul in Madame Mimi with her crystal ball so that her “supposed” supernatural abilities can scare the hell out of them.

Also, a psychic makes a very good front for police to cover up the real source of their information, especially if they got it from an informant or someone confidential or obtained it illegally.

In such instances, law enforcement is more than happy to exploit psychic detectives as a means to further their own ends. And in return, these clairvoyant swindlers can pad their own resume by claiming that they have actually worked for the police. It is a win-win situation for both sides even though it is totally bogus.

In the big picture, psychic detectives have contributed absolutely nothing to the efforts of law enforcement on the local or national level. Unfortunately, the mass media continues to allow them to exaggerate and fabricate their claims because these types of personalities make for good stories even if what they say is untrue.

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