For quality Copaganda, I can recommend S.W.A.T.; it is hilariously bad. I stuck with it because I like laughing at over-serious twaddle; and I find Kenny Johnson very watchable.
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Gibbs is gone from the show, now. Retired. They replaced Mark Harmon with Gary Cole. But they also brought in Wilmer Valderrama, so … kind of a wash on the sexism.
ETA: We’re waaaaaaaaaaaaay off track and it’s partly my fault. Sorry everyone.
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That was my first thought. But the gum didn’t come out of a database. Kinda cool to be surprised!
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They identified him as a suspect by running DNA from the crime scene through one of those ancestry databases, then they got the DNA from his discarded gum after he was already under surveillance to confirm he was the guy they were looking for. Basically the same way they caught Joseph James DeAngelo and other high profile cold case killers.
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That was on very early this morning, I fell asleep half way through but it was a tough watch.
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Where did you hear that?
From the story:
A “snapshot phenotype prediction,” or a test to predict someone’s physical traits based on their DNA, helped genetic genealogists narrow down possible suspects – something Parabon’s Chief Genetic Genealogist CeCe Moore said, “ended up being key in this case.”
Moore said while she was building family trees of the people who shared DNA with the sample provided by police, she discovered World War II draft record cards of red-headed men.
So they don’t explicitly say they used one of those ancestry websites but it’s hard to imagine any other way they could have built a “family tree” from the DNA sample to point them in his direction. It’s not like they were just collecting gum from random redheads around the country hoping for a match.
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Honestly, with regards to punk panic, it’s the best in the genre… all the 80s dramas (especially crime dramas) had punk episodes, and Quincy’s was head and shoulders above the rest!
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Good points and your reasoning seems sound. What is amazing about this story is that nobody seems to know how that match was made. I suppose this will come out in court.
The nyt wrote:
It was not clear how the DNA connection was made; the district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
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Yeah I think law enforcement agencies have started being a little more coy about exactly how and when they use those ancestry sites now that there’s been more awareness (and scrutiny) of the practice. And of course the DNA ancestry companies themselves aren’t necessarily thrilled their services are being used that way since it might make potential customers wary.
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Noooo, not another village fete!
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Now I feel weird about my hobby.
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My dad, a former prosecutor, also loves watching that (and similar shoes) in an MST3K way… 
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So frustrating that there were witnesses who saw a woman in distress, screaming, and did nothing to help her. They could have saved a life.
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Wow, this is giving me flashbacks to Patrice O’Neal (RIP):
I do wonder how much worse that’s going to get, given the amount of data we have on laziness, incompetence, and the resulting delays. Too often that leads to over-reliance on a single resource (forensics expert/lab) or tech solutions to do the work. Unfortunately, the ACAB thread is full of examples of how that can cause terrible outcomes for victims of crime as well as those who suffer due to false accusations/arrests/convictions:
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Murder She Wrote is one of my wife’s favorites along with Matlock and all those sappy Hallmark mystery series.
We’re watching a Columbo marathon and she saw an actor from The Americans. She asked if it was streaming for free anywhere. It is not.
But the complete series on DVD will be here tomorrow. I’ll rip it for her for rainy days in the RV.
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Have you seen “A Touch of Cloth”? “Airplane” meets “CSI”. The cast members are all veterans of police procedural shows, and play it absolutely straight.
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Worse even that using 23andme or similar resources for DNA matching is when the police match DNA from an unrelated crime scene to the DNA from a rape kit to charge the rape victim with some other crime. Federal law doesn’t allow this, but many states do.
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LOVE Columbo!
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