MINDGRIFTERS!

 

Roy Hazelwood and the Rise of Mind-Reading Police Wizards

 

Most of what people think they know about so-called “forensic science” is bullshit, and that fact leads to terrible law enforcement outcomes.

 It’s not their fault. I can’t even lay the blame at the feet of the unending torrent of procedural copaganda that floods popular culture, from Dexter to CSI to Silence of the Lambs (and my beloved Hannibal). No, I blame the wellspring itself. What people think they know about forensic science is bullshit because an astonishing amount of forensic science is, as it turns out, pseudoscientific bullshit.

 We can go into bullshit like bite mark analysis and “forensic hypnosis” another time. For the moment, I’d like to focus specifically on the art of behavioral profiling; arguably the biggest scam the FBI ever pulled (and that is saying something, given the FBI’s impressive record of scams). As you may have seen on Netflix’s Mindhunter, based on the book of the same name by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit spent the late 1970s metastasizing from a relatively benign nodule of the Bureau’s Training Division into a magical cabal of wizards and psychics whose uselessness was only outstripped by their undeserved self-assurance.

 

Graphic courtesy of The Innocence Project

Let’s get this out of the way right up front: much of what the FBI and other law enforcement agencies call “science” is not science at all. One of the questionable techniques employed by the FBI is criminal profiling; the mystical art of conjuring a criminal’s identity out of clues left at crime scenes. You no doubt know exactly what this supposedly looks like, thanks to brilliant author Thomas Harris. His books (specifically Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal) gave us one of fiction’s greatest villains; serial killer, cannibal, role model, and bon vivant Hannibal Lecter. I love Harris’ books, which are erudite and beautifully written. Here’s an important thing to keep in mind when enjoying Harris’ characters or their numberless imitations over the years, however: Thomas Harris writes fiction.

 The same cannot be said for John E. Douglas or – more importantly – Roy Hazelwood.

 

Both John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood are former FBI employees who have written extensively about behavioral profiling, from its early development (Mindhunter) to its formal codification as a pseudoscience with its own particular logic and lurid allure (Dark Dreams, The Evil That Men Do). While Douglas’ Mindhunter is better known due to its extremely decent Netflix adaptation, Douglas’ is not the name that law enforcement professionals invoke when discussing behavioral profiling. That honor goes to opportunistic entrepreneur, braggart, puritanical racist, and staple of abnormal psychology courses nationwide: Mr. (note: not Dr.) Robert Roy Hazelwood.

 Roy Hazelwood, who retired in the 1990s and died in 2016, spent the salad years of his career at the FBI burnishing his “expertise” in sex crimes; particularly accidental death by autoerotic asphyxiation and crimes by sexual sadists. It’s interesting that the process of acquiring said “expertise” involved literally zero psychiatric or psychological study. Let me repeat that. Roy, the “world’s leading expert” on a subfield of psychology, had zero book learning and zero degrees when it came to the topic about which he was considered so learned.

 

Of Roy’s two specialties (autoerotic asphyxiation and sexual sadism), it’s his work in the latter field that I find flabbergasting. The entire art of so-called forensic profiling consists of speculation, assumption, conjecture, and “gut feeling.” This last should give one pause, given that “gut feeling” or “instinct” is the name that humans, barely rational to begin with, give their bias, fear, paranoia, ignorance, and bigotry. The fact that these are standard elements of policework to begin with does not excuse an attempt to sneak “gut feeling” past the gates of science.

 Roy’s own thoughts on intuition are self-contradictory and inadvertently quite telling. In The Evil That Men Do, he writes:

"I just don’t believe there’s such a thing as intuition… I believe that what we call intuition is simply stored and forgotten experiences that the conscious mind somehow can instantaneously retrieve, combine, and process in a way that, superficially at least, seems miraculous or preternatural."

 If there’s one thing that the world doesn’t need, it’s miraculous or preternatural cops. Remember, these are the people – often themselves violent, often themselves inclined to sexual villainy – empowered by the State to imprison, torture, or murder citizens with near-total impunity. A perfect example of why Hazelwood’s “intuition-based” profiling is so troubling comes at the very end of Roy Hazelwood’s The Evil That Men Do. Roy describes a crime scene at which he freely admits that, upon his first look at the evidence, he told a coworker “Our unsub [unknown subject] is black. I don’t know how I know it, I just know it.” Frankly, that sentence alone should have been enough to open a Justice Department investigation into profiling practices at the FBI going all the way back to the mid-70s.

 I’ve read the entirety of Roy Hazelwood’s oeuvre. His two most notable books, The Evil That Men Do and Dark Dreams, proffer some flaccid observations on the practical side of investigating violent sexual crimes, and even a few psychological insights that aren’t entirely worthless (for example: Hazelwood claims, and I have no reason to dispute, that he invented the useful-if-unbelievably-basic distinction between “organized” and “disorganized” criminals). A few of his psychological observations are, while unoriginal, not without merit; the power dynamic of rape being more important than the sexual aspect, for example.

 

Image courtesy of The New Yorker

However, Roy strays very far from his remit nearly constantly, and with a consistent puritanical bent. According to Roy, both anal sex and BDSM are sexual gateway drugs, a KY-greased slope into Roy’s quite overtly Christian hell. Am I leaping to conclusions when I label Roy a sexually uptight G-man? You be the judge. On one occasion, Roy told journalists: “We live in a terrible time where the relationship between a man and a woman living under the same roof is built on hatred and mutual humiliation.” Roy has also repeated, ad nauseum, that pedophiles should be executed out of hand, “for which I was repeatedly called an executioner and even a fascist.” There’s also the minor quibble that Dark Dreams is intentionally structured on what Roy considers an unchanging standard of criminal behavior; namely, that laid down in Augustine’s Confessions, which starts the journey at “sin begins as an intention.” Some time between 397 and 400. And Roy, adopting Augustine’s scientifically invalid model, openly conflates “crime” with “sin” in his formulation; unsurprising from the sort of crusader who consistently called for the execution of sex offenders throughout his long, influential life.

 I plan on writing more about the differences between crime, sin, and wrongdoing in the future, but I believe that the above, along with the abysmal record of the field he helped to pioneer, suffice to demonstrate that Roy “Not a Dr.” Hazelwood doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about – but nothing I’ve read regarding Roy’s lack of self-examination or self-correction indicates to me that he cares if he knows what he’s talking about. And therein lies my biggest problem with Roy and the culture of “forensic science” and “forensic profiling.”

 

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

It doesn’t matter if truth gets mangled and dismembered by courts too malicious, ignorant, or overworked to fact-check things like bite-mark evidence and forensic profiling. The truth doesn’t matter to Roy, the FBI, or any of the other numberless predators, scavengers, and parasites who comprise the criminal justice system. Justice is an industry, not a sacred calling, despite the priestly rhetoric and holy nonsense that assholes like Roy drape over it like a rotting chasuble. That should be obvious from the evidence provided by Roy’s own post-FBI career.

 Roy, like so many higher-ups in the security state, never missed a meal thanks to his reputation as a punisher of “bad guys.” Starting with his time with the Academy Group, Roy made a living selling his “expertise” to cops, one sold-out hotel conference room and bar tab picked up by a starry-eyed police lieutenant at a time. Roy was as capitalistically tireless in his retirement as assholes like George W. Bush or Barack Obama, though I doubt one of Roy’s little speeches ever clocked $750,000 (Bill Clinton) or $400,000 (Barack Obama). Zoom out, however, and you can see that Roy “my powers told me the suspect was black” Hazelwood helped spawn an entire police-entertainment industrial complex, a world of police-wizards where brilliant policework (HAHAHA) allows quirky cop heroes to gaze into mental crystal balls and see into the minds of perpetrators.

 

That’s what Roy’s “science” and the copaganda of police profiling amounts to, in the end; psychic cops. I will say this much: while Roy Hazelwood and his ilk might be grifters, that’s not the worst possible scenario. The worst possible scenario would be one in which Roy wasn’t completely full of shit; one in which the minds of malefactors (which includes a hell of a lot of us, by the system’s standards) are legible to our increasingly murderous and authoritarian security state. I’d rather have mindgrifters on the case than actual mindhunters.