Police spend £20,000 after psychics' advice.

Psychics love to make claims that they 'help the police' with murder and missing persons cases as the police are usually portrayed as being highly skilled, methodical and objective when it comes to solving crime and the psychics are looking to boost their credibility by associating themselves with the police (who rely on experts such as forensic scientists etc.)

Link: http://tinyurl.com/ygydkxy

The police do not systematically use psychics (see our survey of UK police forces) but that doesn't mean that there aren't gullible police officers who do.

Detectives in the Dyfed Powys Police force seem to be an example of such gullibility. They spent up to £20,000 of taxpayers' money on a 5-month murder investigation based on the advice given to them by psychics!

Amazingly, nothing these psychics came up with proved to be true.

Now, police officers are human and just as prone to cognitive biases and magical thinking as anyone else so it should come as no surprise that some officers believe in psychics; however, police forces are publicly accountable bodies with a responsibility to the taxpayers who fund them. This debacle may be seen as psychics wasting police time, but it's much more than that. The police should know better - this was the police wasting police time (and taxpayers' money).

In the article do irrational beliefs cause harm? we looked at some of the consequences that magical thinking has. In this instance we can see economic harm (taxpayers' money wasted that could have been allocated elsewhere), psychological harm (families are often re-traumatised when cases are re-investigated), and social harm (the credibility of the police).

Let's hope that this is an isolated case of a few gullible police officers - and that they learn something from the experience.
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