CSI Helping Naughty Criminals To Escape

There’s not much that TV can teach you.

Lost - how to have a fight on a beach and talk a bit cryptic whenever someone asks a question. The Sopranos - how to get fat and beat people up. Sex In The City - how to be a waffling self-obsessed fool who no doubt considers Bridget Jones Diary to be ‘like, rilly, rilly incredible.’

Yet CSI is an entirely different matter.

For those unfamiliar with the format of the show, CSI (and it’s possibly infinite number of spin-off series, spawning faster than the Beckhams can shit out cross-eyed idiot children) is essentially a forensic textbook distilled into a lovely 45-minute chunk. With lots of shouty stary broody melodrama sandwiched in between.

It has proven to be a huge worldwide hit, gathering a huge fanbase here in the UK (despite its transmission on wavy-lined non-station Channel 5). In some foreign territories, however, the show has gained a wholly different sort of notoriety.

Malaysia, for example.

A senior Malaysian policeman has been arguing that CSI is a force for evil. Deputy Inspector General Musa Hussan claimed in a TV interview that:

"CSI and a few other series teach (viewers) how to remove traces of crime."

hecklerspray still isn’t quite sure what these ‘other series’ are. We’re hoping Mr. Hussan will let us know - after all, those dead hookers in our living room aren’t going to clean themselves up, right, kids?

Because of the success of the series, Hussan reckons that criminals in Malaysia are now perpetually ‘one step ahead’ of their law-keeping counterparts. However, he then went on to negate his own on-air argument, conceding that:

"… there was no proof as yet of criminals using a technique
to destroy evidence detailed on the programme, and improvements in
the force’s intelligence techniques would make it difficult to fool its
officers."

Whether the Malaysian equivalent of Jeremy Paxman reached over the interview desk and gave him a slap is as yet unknown.

Read More:

CSI ‘Helps Criminals To Escape’ - BBC

[story by C J Davies]