And you saw this on a tv program a few years ago? I'm not impressed. I'd seriously challenge the truth of that tv show's claims, the standards of journalism on tv are, with very few exceptions, uniformly low and focused on the sensational and what brings in viewers and advertising dollars. Even A&E and the Discovery Channel, which used to be pretty good, have lapsed into showing some pretty sloppy and credulous documentaries.
I know there are cases of individual police detectives using psychics, but I strongly doubt that there's any credible police force anywhere in the civilized world that routinely uses them as a matter of departmental policy, which is what Ms. Bondar was implicitly trying to claim, and what karrie was implicitly supporting. There are also reasons other than any supposed effectiveness of psychics that might explain police use of them, like to help hide their real sources of information or to cover up the fact that they obtained certain information illegally. If you know anything about the techniques of cold reading you'll know that any good psychic can get a person to provide information and make it appear it came from the psychic, that's how they work.
I challenge anyone to provide a single, well-attested case where a psychic made any useful contribution to a police investigation. "Well-attested" is the operative phrase there. There are lots of anecdotes, lots of unsupported claims, I want evidence that a psychic provided specific, detailed, and correct information that could not have come from any source other than the psychic's supposed powers. A claim like "the body will be found near a lake in a wooded area" doesn't cut it, there's far too much terrain that matches that description, I want to see something like "the body is 75 meters into the woods bearing 170 degrees from the southernmost point on the shore of Lake Woebegon." Or maybe just have the psychic provide the GPS coordinates, that'd be pretty impressive. Until the paranormalists can produce evidence of that quality, I'll continue to call bull**** on everything they say.
