Another interesting summer TV program on cable is the elegantly named series Murder, which appears Tuesday nights on Spike TV. Although it’s a "reality" program, most of which are absolute garbage, Murder is both interesting and somewhat edifying.

The premise of the show is to have two teams compete to solve a real-life crime by visiting a meticulous recreation of the crime scene, hearing the medical examiner summarize the findings of the autopsies, viewing the police interviews, and so on.

Naturally, the program is highly graphic in its presentation of the evidence, so there is a lot of gore to be seen, some of it very ugly indeed.

But the show actually teaches us a good deal about how police really go about solving crimes, which, perhaps needless to say, is significantly different from the way it is portrayed in CSI and other such crime scene-oriented cop show and also quite different from the way it’s shown in the various Law and Order series.

In the CSI shows and others such as Crossing Jordan, the accumulation of numerous bits of physical evidence basically leads the team to the killer, whereas in the LAO shows and others such as Numbers and Criminal Minds, the emphasis is on interviews and footwork.

In Murder, by contrast, the process is shown to require more imagination and intuition in the early part of the investigation, and highly disciplined deduction and accumulation of facts to fit the detectives’ interpretation of the evidence thereafter.

As a result, Murder makes criminal investigation seem rather more interesting and intellectually stimulating than the popular fictional series do.

That’s a rather startling thing to observe, given that the immense popularity of the fictional series is that they seem to have brought a bit more intellect and realism to the crime-show genre than was conventional in the previous decade or so.

Nonetheless, it’s true of Murder, and the show brings out some very interesting and important thoughts about the way our justice system works. 

In revealing how essential it is for the police to develop a theory of the crime quickly and then find an accumulation of facts that fit the theory, Murder vividly illustrates the greatest hazard of our criminal justice system: the possibility that the police and district attorney’s office will pursue the wrong theory and find only those facts that conform to it.

In short, the police can get it wrong and simply not see that they have done so. And this need not be a matter of malice in any way, simply the way the process works.

The program does show the amateur detectives occasionally questioning their guiding theory and considering whether to adopt an alternate explanation, but the typical human tendency is to stick to one’s theory until thoroughly forced off of it. And that, of course, means that police detectives, being human, will often do the same despite intensive training and the  best intentions.

Of course, despite this possibility, our system works remarkably well. The people who investigate and prosecute crimes are nearly always trying to get it right, and mistakes are fortunately rare. In addition, Murder makes it very clear that without a guiding theory, it is simply impossible to conduct a sensible investigation at all. Information is useless without a guiding explanation that can establish what it all means, and the correct solution must remain elusive unless investigators establish hypotheses and test them against the facts.

The key thing is that they must be willing to discard their theory if the facts contradict it, and move on to a new one—and that can be difficult to do.

Hence, as Murder shows without even intending to do so, we must be continuously vigilant in policing the police—not because they are inherently malicious in any way, but simply because they are human.