There is an overwhelming and systematic spirit of derision surrounding the practice of psychic crimefighting. Police forces all over the world have rushed to go on record as disavowing and ruling out any chance of allowing psychic detectives to join the crimefighting teams in their efforts to solve crimes. It is generally known, however, that police investigating cases of missing persons will often allow the child’s family members to consult psychics and pass any useful information back to the police. A lead is a lead, and it matters very little if a psychic was able to provide it. But the caution involved in taking a chance on a psychic when short of leads is perhaps more easily understood if one is reminded that the psychic community is rife with frauds. Therefore, if it were known that a police detective relied on information furnished by a fraudulent psychic, every party in the case would suffer.

Moreover, since police forces do not wish to lend support to what is considered at least a pseudoscience, there is no known record of a psychic solving a criminal case single-handedly.

The psychic detective idea has also been derided and parodied on major television police dramas. On an episode of Law and Order, for example, a psychic who offers his help on a murder case is exposed as a perverted psychopath. However, following the success of the X-Files, which involved FBI investigations into the paranormal and other strange phenomena, the spinoff series Millennium appeared in the late 1990’s. Taking a different approach from the X-Files, Millennium neither supported nor condemned psychic detective work, but instead focused on the investigative career of the lead character, a government agent possessed of a highly developed intuition never directly acknowledged as psychic ability but nonetheless vital to his work. Perhaps leery of the ideas suggested by such a series, the network discontinued the show after a brief run.