Right. They're fishing because they need leads. It's not a complaint about the police doing their job, but that the method in which it is being done automatically casts suspicion on the people found. Investigators feel clever for thinking "No one but the perp, within reason, could've ever searched for these terms in this time." But that just begs the question.

Because the natural consequence of this "experiment" is to cast all subjects in doubt, you must have a methodology that actually selects for the criminal instead of just correlating really strongly. It's the same problem as the social sciences. Except this one comes with legal consequences.

> Investigators feel clever for thinking "No one but the perp, within reason, could've ever searched for these terms in this time."

Luckily, people are convicted when a judge or jury is convinced that the evidence points at them being guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Not when an investigator feels clever.

~95% of all convictions derive from plea bargains, and a not-insignificant portion (2-8%) of those are estimated to be innocent.[1]

So, we have a system where an investigator can indeed "feel clever," produce a defendant based on sketchy evidence, who then pleads out for any number of reasons. Neither judge nor jury ever hears what the evidence is in these cases. Ta da: the immaculate conviction.

1. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/12/26/plea-bargainin...

And this is a problem that go away with less evidence collection?

No, I'm saying that the plea system is the constant. The amount of evidence collected is often irrelevant.

If only.

> If someone disappears, their spouse gets put on the list of persons of interest.

That's because there is a relationship and historically the occasional spouse has been implicated in the murder of their other half.

> So do the last people seen with them.

Proximity means they might be witnesses, not immediately suspects.

> For each one, the police see if there is a case to be made, or if they known anything that could help, and then move on.

Yes. But they don't place everybody that was in a 10 mile radius around the crime scene on their list of suspects because they spoke the name of the victim out loud in the three weeks preceding the crime. And that's roughly the level this is at.

> That's because there is a relationship and historically the occasional spouse has been implicated in the murder of their other half.

There is a relationship here too, although it is not exactly a marital relationship.

> The police are looking for a list of persons of interest to start with.

Then maybe they should ask Google "of this list of people, did any of them search for this person?". Not "give us the list of the entire town's search history, we'll narrow it down to a few people and then totally just throw the rest of this very fascinating data out, pinky-swear".

Comments like this will get your account banned, so please don't.