Saturday, July 05, 2008

The Evil Meter

It’s either one of the other.

I was flipping channels on the box when I came across a show on the Discovery channel about killers and the vicious murders the committed over the years. After watching one of the stories about a killer, the program went on to talk about how a scientist created a scale that has twenty-one different levels to meter where a killer resides on the so-called scientific measurement. Call me crazy, or just call me a cynical deputy sheriff, but there is only one scale to me. My scale has one label, and that one is for good people. The other label is for bad people. There is no in-between, and there is no level of how bad you are. Either you’re a good guy, or a bad guy.

I hate to sound like your typical ghetto gun-slinging Los Angeles cop by saying that, but it’s true. There are good people, and there are bad people, and the victim of a crime isn’t going to care if a professor at an expensive school comes to the conclusion that the bad guy that killed their family member wasn’t quite as bad on the scale of one to twenty-one as the next guy on the list. While I understand that the professor who came up with this scale believes he is doing humanity a greater good by creating this scale, in the end, it’s useless and benign.

That’s one of the problems with the scientific side of criminal justice. There are the crime scene guys who take pictures, identify blood spatter (by the way, if you’re reading this Hollywood, it’s spatter, not splatter), draw up cool diagrams, and send DNA to labs somewhere in the middle of nowhere that tag a sample and send back the results. Then we have the scientists and professors at the colleges and universities that come up with these strange theories and write complex papers about killers and criminals and somehow conclude that the killer is only at fault to a certain point based on whatever scale or level they came up with. It’s a cool theory when you’re sitting in a nice office with wood panels, a bottle of scotch to share with your buddies, and more time and removal from the crime and the events as they unfolded than any officer, deputy, detective or investigator is blessed with when he or she is trying to solve a case and prevent more people from being hurt, but in the long run it doesn’t do much of anything. All that it does is pad the pockets of the scientist or professor who came up with the theory because he can write a book, go on a TV show, or secure his tenure at a well paying university.

But I disgress. This little rant wasn’t about dissing the scientists and professors, it was about the good guys and the bad guys.

Michael Connelly’s fictional LAPD detective, Harry Bosch, said it best when he said that the best way to solve a crime is to “go knock on some doors.” That’s what the victims of crime want, and when it comes down to it, that’s what they good people want. They want us to take the bad guys off the street. No level of profiling can help us get them off the street.