Terrible Police Sketches
March 28, 2013 | Lists
One of the unsung perks of committing a felony in front of a witness is that you don’t have to shell out 10 bucks to have some guy who dropped out of art school sketch your likeness. The police will do it for free.
But as our friends over at List of the Day show the quality of police sketches can vary. First they depend on the reliability of witnesses’ memories. How reliable would your memory be after going through a traumatic event, such as an armed robbery at a bank or being flashed by someone who has let themselves go when it comes to personal fitness. (And in the latter case do the sketches get a bit more graphic?)
While some sketches may bear enough of a resemblance to the perpetrator to get Starbucks attendees to look twice at the guy with the false mustache sliding off and an “I Can’t Believe I Got Away With It” t-shirt, many are not much help. This one, for example, urges the public to be on the lookout for a guy who may or may not be represented by his 300 pound Samoan attorney once he’s apprehended.
Indeed these sketches show that after going through the trauma — or vicarious thrill if we’re talking about a misanthropic bastard — many people automatically think of someone in pop culture. For example, if we were witness to a liquor store heist, we probably would be more focused on what wine was best when paired with a weekend intended to focus on heavy alcohol consumption than whether the wild-eyed maniac waving around a gun had a mole on his neck or an overbite. As such the subsequent police sketch would likely show two perps who resemble Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis from Natural Born Killers regardless of the sex of the perpetrators or even whether there were actually two of them.
Here’ are some more Hilariously Bad Police Sketches.
Top 10 Reasons You Should Not Link To This Post
March 25, 2013 | Lists
1. Does not confirm or play to your long held and well cultivated biases.
2. No nostalgic references to shows or films from your childhood that you grew fond of before developing the critical faculties to recognize how terrible they really were.
3. We will not admonish anyone to “Keep calm and carry on”. Drop whatever it is you’re doing and scream.
4. Does not bemoan technological progress and hanker for less complicated times when people separated by distance would only communicate twice a year due to expensive long distance telephone fees and letter writer apathy.
5. No animals — if you’re looking for a photo of a cat with a caption suggesting it has a brain bigger than a walnut and is bent on world domination, you’re out of luck.
6. No landscape clip art featuring new age banalities from either a best-selling “spiritual guru” or anonymous people who were shut out of the greeting card industry by the rise of the internet.
7. Free of foreigners — or rural people in your own countries — doing wacky things.
8. Contains a sentence, actually this one, that exceeds what most web pundits suggest is the optimal length when it comes to writing for the web because readers in this day and age have short attention spans and are unlikely to make it to the full stop. On a related point, these pundits say that rather than reading web pages, people scan them so having short paragraphs is preferable to longer ones — so you’ve likely skipped over this entry. Inexhaustible, the experts also say that varying sentence world length keeps the writer engaged. Good idea. Screw them. (Or we would say that if they could possibly have made it this far).
9. No pictures of babies pulling faces with accompanying captions suggesting that the child is way more skilled in language than his or her years would allow and is also vulgar.
10. Has the SEO link value of running outside and pointing at someone with your index finger.
