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David Perlmutter's avatar

Real cops often call out fictional crime programs for presenting obvious inaccuracies or illogical scenarios. I guess we can chalk up the murder board as one of those inaccuracies.

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Kevin Mims's avatar

Yeah, but it’s been done to death. Time for TV to dump this cliche and move on.

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David Perlmutter's avatar

Yeah-TV writers love their cliches. Enough to never kill them...

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Anne Ganzert's avatar

Not to toot my own horn, but I wrote an entire book about this trope ("Serial Pinboarding" 2020), coming to a similar conclusion as you :) But what I really wanted to point out was an article by Aki Peritz, who commented on an FBI recruiting campaign that used a murder wall in their advertising (and how ridiculous that is). Here is the link: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/02/fbi-crazy-stringboard-recruiting-campaign.html

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Kevin Mims's avatar

Thank you so much for all this additional information. I may have to update my murder board story at some point. And I will definitely be checking out your book whenever I can find a reasonably priced copy. Currently the cheapest copy online is about $80, too rich for my blood. 😬

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Ann Mullen's avatar

While I don’t disagree that murder boards have been done to death on tv, your assumption they are not used in the real world may not be correct. In 1991 there was a Harvard paper positing the value of Anacapa charts (evidence/murder boards) to law enforcement. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/msparrow/files/application_of_network_analysis_to_criminal_intelligence-social_networks-1991.pdf

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Kevin Mims's avatar

I’ll check it out. Thanks!

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