Talk:Crime woo

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Editorial notes As is, the intro could use a bit of expansion, maybe the titles shrunk a little and the bodies plumped up a little more, and something needs to be done about that image. Looks too... scrawny, whatever that means. The Heidelberg Kid (talk) 17:19, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

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What is crime woo

I don't really understand this page. can someone who does, make our intro paragraph actually reflective of the sub sections? According to our into, crime woo is a fascination with the darks side of law, which seems more like why we write myster novels, than the attemt to use a fear of criminals to sell products or something.GodotGrow a vagina 03:52, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Uh, yeah, this could use at least a bit of a rewrite. This seems to be more about moral panics than woo, per se. However, there is a lot of crime woo. Lie detectors, penile plethysmographs (used to allegedly test for pedophilia), "psychic" investigators, racial profiling, etc. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 04:08, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

I think all of this stuff is interesting, I just hate the intro, as it doesn't explain anything. GodotGrow a vagina 04:16, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

I think we could split it into two sections: Moral panics and pseudoscience. "Tough on crime," for example, could go in the former and psychics hired by legal agencies, as another example, could go in the latter. I don't know much about this stuff, though. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 04:21, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Truth Serum

Regarding this: "Also in this category are things like alleged "truth serums", actually just narcotic drugs that aren't effective in eliciting truthful confessions." The word "narcotic" only really refers to opioid drugs - using it as a catch-all term for any drug, illegal or otherwise, is incorrect. With this in mind, drugs used as "truth serums" are usually from the barbiturate family although sometimes blends of opiates / opioids, barbs and or benzos can similarly depress the central nervous system and interfere with judgment and higher cognitive function. Scopolamine with morphine was a popular combination at one point. They can produce good results by lowering the inhibitions of the person being questioned making them more eager to talk and by also lowering any barriers they may have erected in their mind to hide the truth, but there is no easy way for the questioner to reliably tell the difference between truthful confession and intoxicated fantasy. Another important point to remember about such drugs is that they leave the subject very open to suggestion and persuasion, making it very easy for an un-ethical interrogator to coax and prod them towards remembering and confessing to events that never happened.

--Myk

Lead poisoning

I'm wondering whether lead poisoning ought to be mentioned in this article. It apparently correlates with crime rates. See here or here. I don't know if there is much to the claim though. Bismarck (talk) 10:53, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

I came to this talk page to ask the same question. We all know that lead has effects on neurological development. And we all know that some of those effects can make people aggressive. Now is there something to this hypothesis? And if not, might we as Rationalwiki do some debunking? Pizzameister (talk) 18:48, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Like this: Lead-crime hypothesis? MarmotHead (talk) 18:54, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. Maybe this should be linked more extensively Pizzameister (talk) 19:54, 29 January 2016 (UTC)

D.A.R.E.

What does the acronym stand for - Daleks Are Really Everywhere?

Perhaps there could be a mention of crime novels - murder is the only crime worth investigating (and all too often 'the resident nutter diddit'). 82.44.143.26 (talk) 17:52, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Crime novels woo

Murder constitutes 95%+ of all crime.

'The police' only have one crime at at time to consider - any other crime that happens is somehow linked to the first murder.

The police have a near 100% success and conviction rate - and they never arrest the 'freelance crime detector' on suspicion of multiple murder. 31.51.114.49 (talk) 21:43, 18 April 2017 (UTC)