I was as amazed as anyone with the news from last week’s police arbitration hearing. During the course of the hearing, I discovered that not only did the police department use a so-called psychic to help find a missing man, but the same so-called psychic harassed the victim in the case, the missing man’s wife.

I say “so-called” psychic because, while many people may believe in them, I cannot believe anyone who is not a regular lottery winner is a psychic.
Were psychics real, we’d know where Jimmy Hoffa was buried, we’d have no cold cases and that man who was missing would have been found. For years, professional debunker and skeptic James Randi offered one million dollars to anyone who could prove to be a psychic on “Larry King Live” and time and again, King would ask “professional” psychics he’d have on as guests to accept Randi’s challenge.

Needless to say, Randi kept his money.

It’s not unusual for victims of crimes to engage psychics and private detectives and Internet sleuths for help finding loved ones. The pain and desperation a victims feels must be overwhelming and powerful enough to cloud sound judgment.
Police and investigators, however, are supposed to be methodical and rational and trade in fact and reason. I can’t imagine any police academy instructing officers to trust so-called psychic.

In fact, inviting a psychic on a police investigation may cause real harm.
First, inviting a psychic on a police investigation immediately calls into question the ability of the police to solve the case. In my mind at least, if the police call a psychic I have to assume they have no better option than literally guessing for clues. That doesn’t create a lot of faith in any police force.

Second, inviting a random outsider with no police training and no history of solving anything along on an investigation seems like a good way to develop worthless leads that waste money and time. At the very worst, inviting an untrained member of the public into a crime investigation could potentially damage evidence or cause evidence to be ignored.

Finally, as we saw during the arbitration hearing, a random stranger isn’t bound by duty to adhere to certain protocols and rules that forbid harassing the public. According to this so-called psychic’s own testimony, she left bones and burning bags of dog feces in the yard of a woman who was desperately seeking to find her husband.

One might assume that after this debacle unfolded in 2015 and after the man was not found, that the Port Arthur Police Department would no longer depend on the services of this (or any) so-called psychic.

But one would be wrong. Undeterred by scandal and failure, our police department again returned to the same so-called psychic for advice.
Just last fall the department called on this woman for help in solving a cold case some 30 years old.

One of the police officers, an officer no longer with the department, was quoted at the time as saying, “I brought her to four crime scenes and she told me about things she should not have known.”

And yet, again, the so-called psychic failed to crack the case.

Who could have seen that one coming?

Anybody.

Because here’s the thing about psychics. Nobody can see the future. Nobody can know the unknown. But anybody can be a so-called psychic and anybody can be a really good, convincing psychic if they are talented enough and know how to draw out information through subtle probing and hints. Saying things like “I feel that….” or “perhaps…” are both vague and yet certain enough to elicit more information from a subject but these techniques do not lead to any truth because, again, psychics do not exist.

I am glad in both of these instances the so-called psychic led detectives to dead ends. Heaven forbid someone get arrested and stand trial on the word of a charlatan.

We do not live in the Middle Ages and our evidence must be more solid than the word of egotistical fraudsters who callously use victims’ plights to make headlines and gin up business for themselves.

It might be fun to get a horoscope reading or consult a palm reader but when it comes to police cases I hope we can agree to let the professionals handle it from here on out.

Jesse Wright is the editor of the Port Arthur News. You may email him at jesse.wright@panews.com