(C) BoingBoing This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The truth about Lt. Columbo [1] ['Rob Beschizza'] Date: 2025-10-20 After Columbo Day last week, I refreshed my childhood memory of the investigator's exploits in late 20th-century Los Angeles, where he exposed the city's most cunning and confident murderers. Lieutenant Columbo, performed by the late Peter Falk, codified the "howcatchem" genre: the audience knows who the killer is, and it's all about how they are exposed. Columbo, with his shabby raincoat and deferential persona, was easily ignored by the snobs and aspirants of high society. But his shrewd insight made him their apex predator. He invariably drew incriminating remarks, errors and confessions from his targets. It was perfect television. As a police procedural drama, though, something odd emerges from the formula: why would a detective do all this before conducting a formal investigation? If he Mirandizes a suspect now and again, it's only after he has explained in exhaustive detail the evidence against them, the likely theory of their prosecution, and in all likelihood demanded and received a full confession. Do you think District Attorneys want cops doing all that before suspects are even read their rights? His obsession with exposing truth and getting confessions first struck me as a hidden layer to the show: Columbo represents a Catholic critique of the Anglo-American legal tradition. He is not all that interested in helping the state apply secular justice; he is instead all about saving his suspects. But there's an even better explanation for his peculiar methods: Lt. Columbo is a blackmailer. Columbo is shaking down high society. On the one hand, Columbo is a class hero. On the other hand, Columbo was and remains by far the most brazenly corrupt police officer in the history of Los Angeles Police Department. The evidence, in a nutshell: 1. He tells people the evidence against them and solicits confessions before they are official suspects or read their rights. He shows casual disregard for legal procedures and outright contempt for evidentiary preservation: no crime scene is left unspoiled. He might expect to face professional consequences for his methods, but does not, for the simple reason that none of it occurs in the course of legitimate police work. 2. He organizes bizarre set-pieces that often involve him entering suspects' homes and places of business and altering and arranging items relevant to the investigation, all to unsettle his targets and show them what he knows about them. He is making clear to them that he represents the power of the law but is free to engage in unlawful conduct. He can do anything he pleases. 3. He is rarely seen inside police stations. The most notable depiction of him in an office presents scant evidence it was really his office. Not one thing in it could not have been posed within seconds. There is little for him to do there beyond necessities required to maintain his position, and he wants to keep his actual work as far from there as possible. 4. His focus on wealthy socialites, vulnerable to publicity. He uses compromising and embarrassing social calls, with his disruptive and scruffy persona on full display, to pry into the lives of suspects. His conversation constantly blurs the line between the professional and personal, not least his mentions of a mysterious wife whose only depictions were later expressly disclaimed as non-canonical and who may have been a time-traveling starship captain. 5. He routinely uses psychological techniques characteristic of con-artists: deception, manipulation, the careful construction of seemingly inescapable outcomes. You might rightly point out that police have always done likewise and are permitted to do so, but Columbo only does it when no-one but him and his crew are watching. These are rarely if ever formal interviews and clearly not going into evidence. Likewise, in cases with a diversity of evidence against a suspect, Columbo takes particular interest in that which would be most useful for blackmail. He homes in on something about his suspects that they desperately want to keep hidden, even when such information would be of little use to prosecutors or even problematic for the case. He subtly uses these details (affairs, financial problems, past crimes) to indicate that their legal problems flow from other problems and that he can solve all of them. 6. He rarely interacts with other law enforcement except low-ranking officers who perform specific functions for him in his weird confrontations with suspects. They are his corrupt goons and whether they are even real police is questionable. 7. His first name, Frank, is depicted on several occasions on his badge, on paperwork and evidence containers, but the show's creators insisted that was not his name. When he is asked, he replies "lieutenant." There is no reason for any of this sketchiness unless he is up to no good. 8. The targets often engage in gamely but inadvisable repartee with Lt. Columbo. So eager are they to discuss their own hypothetical criminal actions that they regularly disclose information that even he is unaware of. Exposed, his targets are happy to explain themselves. This is because they have deduced that Columbo is shaking them down and want to move things along. They are pleased that he will offer them an alternative to incarceration and public disgrace. 9. Age: Lietnant Columbo is 50 years old at the outset of the show, has done nothing else in his life, and is still at it in his eighties. LAPD officers are eligible to retire at age 50. Columbo doesn't carry a gun. QED. Now, I haven't seen every episode or talked to anyone who has, but after a few hours YouTubing clips I'm very sure of my hypothesis. As the tenor of our age is to simply ignore contrary evidence, you can be sure of it too! [END] --- [1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/10/20/the-truth-about-lt-columbo.html Published and (C) by BoingBoing Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/