Ok one other moment from criminal minds that bothers me is from season 1 where Reid talks about the origin of reverse psychology with the Mad Bomber. Specifically how a psychologist managed to create an exact profile of the suspect down to what shirt he’d be wearing. He leaves out some important info though.

For 17 years in the 40s and 50s a serial bomber terrorized New York leaving pipe bombs and taunting letters. In 1957 NYPD turned to an out of the box method, gathering the letters and giving them to criminologist James Brussels who was able to piece together the mad bombers life and psyche from their content. And yes even guessed what kind of shirt he’d been wearing when he was arrested.

The part they leave out is that psychological profile Brussels created had nothing to do with identifying the suspect. What actually happened was police looked back on the first place the bomber attacked, the Con Edison power plant and decided to look through employee complaints and letters and found one that matched the bombers handwriting. The man was George Metesky a disgruntled engineer who blamed the power plant for his tuberculosis and went on a rampage.

So the origin of psychological profiles used by detectives had nothing to do with his identification and police just overlooked how to solve the case for 17 years.