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submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by ButtBidet@hexbear.net to c/movies@hexbear.net

I've been going through the Columbo catalog. Yes, Columbo is really cool, as police shows go. Also I was watching a bit of Red Dragon.

One common narrative is that some cops are special, and have this really precise intuition, which someone magically cuts through all the many details of the case and exactly hones in on the correct perpetrator, which is never without fail. I love Columbo, but FUCKKKK he's so guilty of this. From minute ten of the episode, he's knows who is the murderer and he's just examining all the inconsistencies of the story until the murderer just confesses and goes to a life in prison without a fight. In Red Dragon, ~~Ben~~ Ed Norton's character can just look at the crime scene photos and then the crime plays in his brain like a movie. I might be exaggerating slightly as I was bored of that film. Think Odo, who just knows when something illegal is going to go down.

I feel like many cop movies have this "special police intuition" trope going on.

It does upset me. If one's ever gone dealt with the legal system in any way, cops are wrong AF. I think we've all experienced it when a cop makes a snap (lazy) judgement, follows through with their hunch out of sheer laziness and hubris, the cop builds a lazy ass case out of vibes, and then the innocent victim spends an inordinate amount of time and money trying to prove their innocence, if they're even able to secure their innocence. Often many are stuck with the results of a 5 second cop hunch for the rest of their lives. Prosecutors and courts generally take the cops' findings at their word.

In another venue, we've all tried fighting snap judgements is from admin on Twitter and reddit-logo. AFAIK, I've never seen an admin apologise or return a ban.

I feel like some podcast like Citations Needed or whatever covered this, but no amount of Googling led me to where this idea came from.

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[-] SevenSkalls@hexbear.net 15 points 3 days ago

But wasn't Sherlock Holmes less of a "cop's intuition" kind of detective and way more pure robotic logic? "If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth". He was the kind to collect evidence and then see what that leads to without preconceptions, beyond what he can hear and observe.

On the other hand, what OP is talking about are cops and detectives that have a feeling they know how is guilty due to instinct, experience, their gut, whatever you want to call it, and then do their best to track down evidence that proves that person is it. Columbo does this by picking up guilty vibes sometimes, I think they've done this in Brooklyn 99 where they have to prove someone did a crime and the tough part is proving it. This does happen in real life occasionally (I just read the book Killers of the Flower Moon, for example) but it also leads to cops relentlessly chasing the innocent too because the person has guilty vibes (i.e. They're black or poor).

[-] purpleworm@hexbear.net 6 points 2 days ago

I think what you're saying just means the Enlightenment values of Sherlock Holmes have been bastardized and vulgarized because thinking about deduction is too hard for the people who write procedurals now.

this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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