5 ms·

Slightly off-topic but related, I started watching the JCS Criminal Psychology channel and it's incredible. Police interviews of convicted killers, mass shoote

Slightly off-topic but related, I started watching the JCS Criminal Psychology channel and it's incredible. Police interviews of convicted killers, mass shooters, and even a few innocent people: https://www.youtube.com/c/JCSCriminalPsychology/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/JCSCriminalPsychology/videos Their latest video is of the Parkland mass shooter. Once I finished their YouTube videos their Patreon had a few more: https://www.patreon.com/jimcantswim https://www.patreon.com/jimcantswim

Smithalicious 5y ago
I think this channel hit the YouTube algorithm lottery, I feel like everyone is talking about it these past few days
- robocat 5y ago
  I don’t participate in social media (unless hn social media) so this feels reminiscent of “did you watch that on TV last night”, which no longer exists for most of us. The series is very good, and it reminds me why I am glad to live in New Zealand - where most of my interactions with the police have been pleasant (being middle class white guy may help there). I saw a policeman with a sidearm the other day, which was very surprising to me (they don’t usually carry, although I think they mostly now do have a shotgun locked in the boot of the patrol car).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
diplodocusaur 5y ago
It's interesting to see this mentioned in different places and wonder how much "the algorithm" shapes group thought. Or it goes the other way? Did you search for it? I watched them too. They're surprising.
- morsch 5y ago
  I didn't search for it, and I have no particular interest in the topic, but YouTube has been relentlessly trying to get me to watch their most recent video for a couple of days.
aaron-santos 5y ago
JCS Criminal Psychology is a fantastic reminder and deep dive into what happens when you talk to police, why you shouldn't, and what you should do instead. It details interrogation techniques [Reid] in a way that made me understand precisely how lying, leverage, and power factor into getting suspects to self incriminate without necessarily admitting guilt. As a side note it was fascinating that multiple times, interrogators lied about realtime, see through walls, global satellite coverage and not once did a suspect question that ability. It was great being a domain expert on something to see exactly how far interrogators will lie in order to elicit a response. (Not a lawyer. Not your lawyer)
- handrous 5y ago
  > Not a lawyer. Not your lawyer You don't need this. "IANAL" was just a (partly tongue-in-cheek) way to provide context so people didn't mistake a poster for a legal expert if they're writing with an otherwise authoritative tone, but really that's just assumed unless stated otherwise, and "I am not your lawyer" is part of a common disclaimer by actual lawyers to make it 1000% clear that they're not providing legal advice in their official capacity and so creating a lawyer/client relationship, when posting their opinions online. No part of this is even maybe needed if you're not a lawyer, and even the "I am not your lawyer" thing is probably an example of excessive ass-covering (but the law's all about that, so, no surprise there)
  - aaron-santos 5y ago
    Thank you. It's a tough habit to break after reading it for so many years.
    - handrous 5y ago
      Oh, I get it. It's a weird self-reinforcing meme (in the classical sense). People see it, so they write it, so others see it, so they write it, some of the ones along the line think there must be a good reason so they're really careful to write it, and so on. Really similar to how language evolves generally, through misunderstandings or misappropriated terms that come to actually mean the thing they were initially mistaken to mean (possibly losing the original sense entirely, sooner or later), except that in this case it's not actually signifying anything. Just a linguistic tic.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
The first interview in the Parkland video is exactly like Seb in the article: cold, disconnected, seemingly unbothered they've been apprehended, providing only the facts of their murders.
meowface 5y ago
I love their channel and all of their videos, and I think they're generally pretty balanced, but I get the impression there's some pseudoscience and somewhat uncritical acceptance of certain police techniques in some parts of some videos, and also some inferring of people's internal mental states based on assumptions and confirmation bias. For example, while I do think the Parkland shooter was almost certainly heavily malingering - to the point of it being absurdly blatant - every single thing he did was interpreted and explained in the context of malingering. It's very possible those interpretations were all correct, but I feel like there was high confidence in all of the psychological explanations despite the confidence not always being warranted to such a high degree. And I've seen similar high-confidence explanations about other people's psychologies and intentions at any given moment. This is kind of a mirror of the Reid technique in general: >For example, Reid believed that "tells" such as fidgeting was a sign of lying, and more generally believed that trained police interrogators could intuitively check lies merely by how they were delivered. Later studies have shown no useful correlation between any sort of body movements such as breaking eye contact or fidgeting and truth-telling. While police can be effective at cracking lies, it is via gathering contradicting evidence; police officers have shown to be no better than average people at detecting lies merely from their delivery in studies. In the videos, we know the suspects are guilty and lying, so it's easy to associate certain behavior with deception. And some do appear to genuinely just be terrible liars. But without the advantage of hindsight knowledge, it's easy to feel confident you see similar behavior in other people and extrapolate that they're lying without actually having any substantiated evidence that you're right or not.

Smithalicious 5y ago

I think this channel hit the YouTube algorithm lottery, I feel like everyone is talking about it these past few days

robocat 5y ago
I don’t participate in social media (unless hn social media) so this feels reminiscent of “did you watch that on TV last night”, which no longer exists for most of us. The series is very good, and it reminds me why I am glad to live in New Zealand - where most of my interactions with the police have been pleasant (being middle class white guy may help there). I saw a policeman with a sidearm the other day, which was very surprising to me (they don’t usually carry, although I think they mostly now do have a shotgun locked in the boot of the patrol car).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

diplodocusaur 5y ago

It's interesting to see this mentioned in different places and wonder how much "the algorithm" shapes group thought. Or it goes the other way? Did you search for it? I watched them too. They're surprising.

morsch 5y ago
I didn't search for it, and I have no particular interest in the topic, but YouTube has been relentlessly trying to get me to watch their most recent video for a couple of days.

aaron-santos 5y ago

JCS Criminal Psychology is a fantastic reminder and deep dive into what happens when you talk to police, why you shouldn't, and what you should do instead. It details interrogation techniques [Reid] in a way that made me understand precisely how lying, leverage, and power factor into getting suspects to self incriminate without necessarily admitting guilt. As a side note it was fascinating that multiple times, interrogators lied about realtime, see through walls, global satellite coverage and not once did a suspect question that ability. It was great being a domain expert on something to see exactly how far interrogators will lie in order to elicit a response. (Not a lawyer. Not your lawyer)

handrous 5y ago
> Not a lawyer. Not your lawyer You don't need this. "IANAL" was just a (partly tongue-in-cheek) way to provide context so people didn't mistake a poster for a legal expert if they're writing with an otherwise authoritative tone, but really that's just assumed unless stated otherwise, and "I am not your lawyer" is part of a common disclaimer by actual lawyers to make it 1000% clear that they're not providing legal advice in their official capacity and so creating a lawyer/client relationship, when posting their opinions online. No part of this is even maybe needed if you're not a lawyer, and even the "I am not your lawyer" thing is probably an example of excessive ass-covering (but the law's all about that, so, no surprise there)
- aaron-santos 5y ago
  Thank you. It's a tough habit to break after reading it for so many years.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Oh, I get it. It's a weird self-reinforcing meme (in the classical sense). People see it, so they write it, so others see it, so they write it, some of the ones along the line think there must be a good reason so they're really careful to write it, and so on. Really similar to how language evolves generally, through misunderstandings or misappropriated terms that come to actually mean the thing they were initially mistaken to mean (possibly losing the original sense entirely, sooner or later), except that in this case it's not actually signifying anything. Just a linguistic tic.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

The first interview in the Parkland video is exactly like Seb in the article: cold, disconnected, seemingly unbothered they've been apprehended, providing only the facts of their murders.

meowface 5y ago

I love their channel and all of their videos, and I think they're generally pretty balanced, but I get the impression there's some pseudoscience and somewhat uncritical acceptance of certain police techniques in some parts of some videos, and also some inferring of people's internal mental states based on assumptions and confirmation bias. For example, while I do think the Parkland shooter was almost certainly heavily malingering - to the point of it being absurdly blatant - every single thing he did was interpreted and explained in the context of malingering. It's very possible those interpretations were all correct, but I feel like there was high confidence in all of the psychological explanations despite the confidence not always being warranted to such a high degree. And I've seen similar high-confidence explanations about other people's psychologies and intentions at any given moment. This is kind of a mirror of the Reid technique in general: >For example, Reid believed that "tells" such as fidgeting was a sign of lying, and more generally believed that trained police interrogators could intuitively check lies merely by how they were delivered. Later studies have shown no useful correlation between any sort of body movements such as breaking eye contact or fidgeting and truth-telling. While police can be effective at cracking lies, it is via gathering contradicting evidence; police officers have shown to be no better than average people at detecting lies merely from their delivery in studies. In the videos, we know the suspects are guilty and lying, so it's easy to associate certain behavior with deception. And some do appear to genuinely just be terrible liars. But without the advantage of hindsight knowledge, it's easy to feel confident you see similar behavior in other people and extrapolate that they're lying without actually having any substantiated evidence that you're right or not.