Insight into criminal minds is full of drama
CHIEF Superintendent Kev Guteridge is hoping to recruit an ex- criminal to the community policing board to gain insight into criminal behaviour.
This is the stuff of ancient history and modern drama.
The concept of it taking a criminal to think like a criminal dates back to classic Greek writer Callimachus who wrote “being a thief myself, I recognise the tracks of a thief.”
The reformed convict Eugene Francois Vidocq ( 1775- 1857) founded the French National Police and insisted on only hiring criminals.
This became the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes.
The Behavioural Analysis Unit in the crime drama Criminal Minds used the same principle supported by the latest computer technology.
The ability of an ex- thief to bring other criminals to justice became a large and small screen trope. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950s To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly involved the modus operandi of the French cat- burglar.
A similar theme was promoted in the 1960s TV spy fiction It Takes a Thief with Robert Wagner.
Leonardo DiCaprio played the legendary impostor Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can who was hired by the US Federal Government to detect frauds.
Matt Bomer, the anklewearing art forger, becomes an FBI consultant in White Collar.
Even reality TV’s It Takes a Thief had its own version where two rehabilitated criminals rob consenting victims to demonstrate their home security deficiencies ( one of the scenarios also used in a White Collar episode).
The satirical commentary of Sir Terry Pratchett on law and order and the City Watch in Guards, Guards! sounds quite similar to Bulletin texters.
Pratchett wrote: “The phrase ‘ set a thief to catch a thief’ had by this time ( after strong representation from the Thieves’ Guild) replaced a much older and quintessentially AnkhMorporkian proverb, which was ‘ Set a deep hole with springloaded sides, whirling blades … broken glass and scorpions to catch a thief’.” WILLIAM ROSS,
Cranbrook.