Name: Crime.
Age: As old as humanity.
Appearance: Really easy to solve.
What? Crime’s a piece of cake, isn’t it? Anyone could solve it.
Actually, crime is famously difficult to solve. Dozens of murders go unsolved every year in the UK. Well, they’d better get me on the job, then, hadn’t they?
Why? Are you a qualified forensic scientist? Almost. I watch a lot of true crime shows on the telly.
Oh no. I’m really good at them, too. I solved American Nightmare. I solved Worst Roommate Ever. I solved The Devil Next Door, The Night Stalker and American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombing.
When you say you solved them … I mean I watched them all the way to the end. But you know what? I took something important from each of them, and now I’m pretty sure that I could solve a murder.
What a uniquely odd person you are. Oi, less of the unique. A new study shows that a third of Britons are just like me. We are all convinced, illogically, that we could solve a murder case. What’s more, 18% of us think we could find a missing person, 17% think we could solve a fraud case and 13% think we’d be really good at cracking cybercrime.
But you’re not police officers. We don’t need to be! We live in a golden age of true crime content. Everywhere you go there are shows, podcasts and books devoted to retelling horrific crimes in the most grisly way possible, because of the public’s unending desire to distil the worst moments of someone’s life into a gulp of disposable entertainment.
You’re not really selling humanity as a species here. Doesn’t matter. By watching all these true crime shows, we’re also watching the crimes get solved, absorbing all the patterns and techniques necessary to bring a criminal to justice.
But you know you’re only watching an edited retelling that condenses the cases, usually omitting years and years of tedious, backbreaking investigation, right? Nah, I could solve a murder, easy.
Do you have any facts to back you up? Well, the study was commissioned by TV channel True Crime for the launch of its new show Killers: Caught on Camera, and presenter Dr Julia Shaw has commented on the results.
What did she say? She said: “Couch sleuthing is great but, remember, those of us who make true crime documentaries whittle down months or years of police work into less than an hour. Don’t underestimate the tedious work involved in actual crime solving – all the dead ends, inconclusive evidence, paperwork, the waiting for search warrants, the cases that remain unsolved.”
So what’s the lesson here? Is it that I’m better at solving crimes than Dr Julia Shaw?
You’re an idiot. Spoken like a true murderer.
Do say: “Solving crimes is harder than it looks on TV.”
Don’t say: “I’ll stick to amateur surgery, then.”
