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HectorJelly Blog Updates: Homicide, A year on the Killing Streets

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    HectorJelly Blog Updates: Homicide, A year on the Killing Streets



    I recently read Homicide, A year on the Killing Streets, which is the novel David Simon wrote about a year he spent embedded with the Baltimore murder detectives. One of the things that struck me was the similarities between a poker player and a detective. Bear with me....

    There is huge pressure on detectives on what is called the clearance rate. Simply put, this is the percentage of murders that they have "cleared" every year. A case is cleared once they have charged someone with the murder, and the case has gone to the public prosecuter. A good clearance rate is a sign of a good detective right? Unfortunately it's not that easy. There is a huge amount of varience in each murder. Some of them are called "dunkers". Thats shorthand for a very easy to solve murder, a slam dunk. A typical dunker might involve a domestic abuse in which the spouse immediately confesses, or a crime of passion with plenty of witnesses and an obvious motive. The other side of the coin however is "who dunnits". These are much harder to solve. At worst these can mean there is no evidence, no crime scene, no witnesses; just a body and endless questions.

    Some cases become much easier over time, some much harder. Some cases shelved for months due to lack of evidence can be reopened because of a random phone call, or a witness might turn up hoping to make a plea bargain deal rather than go to jail. In other cases witnesses may recant their testimony, or be killed.

    As you can see there is a huge amount of luck involved. No matter how good or bad a detective is, he is at the mercy of the events beyond his control. That said, there are numerous ways in which a good detective can influence his clearance rate. A detective with an eye for detail may spot an inconsistency in witnesses statements, or notice an avenue of investigation that hadn't been fully explored. A detective with a good interrogation technique may get a confession where a bad one would only get lies, or worse silence. (The most interesting part of the book is the lengths the detectives go to to browbeat the suspects into confessing. Always staying within the letter of the law, if not the spirit, of the law. It's quite the art form).

    There are no training simulators for murder detectives. They work as back up to a senior detective on a couple of cases, and then they are thrown in on the deep end to see if they can sink or swim with a real case.

    One of the things that struck me as I began to play poker, as this was one of the few times I felt like I was actually experiencing numbers. After you have played a certain amount (Maybe a million hands!) you actually feel the maths wash over you. You make as good a decision as possible, and then late fate decide the outcome. Any time you put your money in a pot, you trust in the immutable law of averages to come up with an equitable solution. (Although you secretly hope this could be somehow tilted in your favour!).

    But what if it goes wrong? Like a murder detective, the skills involved in playing poker are real, yet somehow intangible. One of the key skills to playing poker is to get your opponent to put money in with a worse hand. However those worse hands will sometimes win. If your running bad, those hands may win again and again and again. Do you change your methods? Or do you try and reduce the role that luck plays? (Which is ultimately fruitless.)

    As I read the book, I could empathise with the detectives battling against the randomness inherint in their work. One of the best detectives has a very bad year, and all of a sudden his unusual working methods are being closely examined.

    As you may of guessed, I'm on a bad run. So what am I doing? Well I've metaphorically reined in the horses. I'm playing less tables, for less time at lower stakes. I've also freed myself from all distractions. My phone is in the other room and the only things I have open on my desktop are my poker client and winamp. Hopefully it will turn around, or else there may well be a stone cold "whodunnit" right here.

    (The book is great by the way).

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