[imagesource: YouTube / JCS – Criminal Psychology]

It’s tough to pinpoint exactly where it began, but Netflix’s Making a Murderer was perhaps the starting point for our true-crime obsession.

Then again, the trials of OJ Simpson and Oscar Pistorius show that society as a whole has always had a fascination with such matters.

Now we have countless true-crime documentaries and docuseries, podcasts, and even comedy series about true-crime podcasts.

That last one refers to Only Murders in the Building, starring Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez, and I would highly recommend that you give it a shot.

Over on YouTube, the JCS – Criminal Psychology channel has become a smash hit among true-crime fans, with the 19 videos on the channel amassing more than 280 million views in total.

VICE below:

JCS Criminal Psychology videos are psychological deep-dives into the criminal interrogation process. JCS takes publicly available footage of criminal interrogations and adds their own sober, incisive, sometimes dryly funny or mildly sarcastic explanations of why both the suspects and trained interrogators behaved in certain ways during the interrogation.

They speed up the videos and pause at the good parts, which is also what makes their usually hour-long videos so completely different from the hours-long raw unedited clips you can otherwise access.

The result is an endlessly fascinating look into how people who have recently committed terrible crimes behave at possibly the most high-stakes moment of their lives, and the many subtle and overt ways police are trained to elicit confessions, figure out if a suspect is lying, or obtain enough conflicting information to help strengthen a prosecutor’s case in court.

The most popular video, ‘What pretending to be crazy looks like’, has more than 50 million views.

It focuses primarily on the interrogation of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter Nikolas Cruz, although it also deals with other cases:

Exactly who runs the channel is not known (it’s rumoured to be the work of a group of people), with videos narrated by Kizzume, perhaps best known as the person who runs ‘True Crime Loser’ on YouTube.

‘Jennifer’s Solution’, which centres on the confession of a 24-year-old Vietnamese-Canadian woman who hired mercenaries to stage a robbery and murder her strict parents in 2010, has amassed more than 30 million views.

In the video, Kizzume breaks down how and why investigators became suspicious of Jennifer Pan’s story.

These include her speech patterns, how she sat, her gestures, and other insights that the average person would never spot:

One person likened watching the JCS – Criminal Psychology videos to learning a mentalist’s tricks:

…when you see how specific actions from trained detectives can trigger certain automatic reactions – like how easily a suspect can be lulled into complacency by a seemingly-friendly detective; how a calculated pause can spur a suspect on to provide more details; or how the interrogator providing an alternate, more palatable explanation for a grisly crime can inspire a suspect to confess.

I guess it could also come in handy if you want to see how to lie to investigators more effectively, should you ever be accused of such a crime.

‘Wrath of Jodi’, the longest video on the channel, runs for more than two hours. It deals with Jodi Arias, who murdered ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander in 2008:

Arias first denied any involvement, before saying that she killed him in self-defence. Alexander sustained 27 to 29 knife wounds and a gunshot to the head, and Arias was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2015.

The channel is not without its criticism, and the fact that the credentials of the people offering these diagnoses can’t be scrutinised means we have no idea what expertise they actually have.

If you take one thing away from this, says VICE, it should be this – never be interrogated without your lawyer present.

[source:vice]