University Police attempted to train their intuitive skills in a lesson in alternative crime fighting last night. Using pendulums, divining rods and a Tibetan singing bowl, officers tried to get in touch with their subconscious minds as a way of complimenting more traditional crime-fighting techniques.
Kathryn Harwig, an Osseo attorney who delivered the lecture, said she prefers the term “intuitive ability” to the term “psychic.”
“But I think the two words are describing the same phenomenon,” she said. “It’s just that people tend to associate the word psychic with something mystical and unexplainable, and what I’m trying to teach is that it is trainable.”
About 25 officers from the University Police and a variety of other forces attended the class, titled “The Intuitive Advantage.” At the start of the class, Harwig asked the officers to put aside their skepticism and give her lecture the benefit of the doubt.
“My sense is that if there were ever a group of people who need to use and who do use their intuition in daily life, it is police officers, because you have to act quickly and often act on your gut,” she said. “If you’re not using it, you’re not using all the gifts you’ve been given.”
Harwig used a variety of activities to encourage officers to develop and trust their intuitive senses.
She said holding a pendulum and asking it yes-and-no questions was one way officers could access their subconscious. She said she had asked who murdered JonBenet Ramsey in the child murder case that has Denver police and the tabloids working around the clock. The pendulum’s deduction — Ramsey’s mother. “It really surprised me because every sense of my being told me it was Dad,” she said.
She also demonstrated dowling rods, made of L-shaped thin, metal wires that rotate on a handle. Working on the same principle as a “water witch,” she said the rods can measure the electromagnetic aura around everyone. She demonstrated with several officers, showing how the rods moved in and out as they got close to the officers’ bodies. Officers can teach themselves to see this aura around a person, an ability Harwig said children are born with but are taught to ignore and filter out.
“Some people can see it very easily, and some people have to be trained,” she said. “But everyone can see it.”
Harwig said this ability can be helpful ininterrogation, in addition to helping officers be aware of the aura that they project to others in a particular situation. “But you have to be aware that while you are reading other people, they are also reading you,” she said.
There is nothing supernatural about intuition, but officers can use it to access the subconscious, she said. “All the information you see and hear is filed away,” she said. “What your intuition does is give you a different way to access something you already know. It’s not something mystical.”
However, in one exercise, she held up a photograph in a manila envelope and asked the officers to get some sense of or association with the picture inside. Harwig said this technique, called “remote viewing,” was used by the Defense Department in the Gulf War, where people who received intuition training attempted to draw Saddam Hussein’s locations on paper. However, she said the operation was discontinued when it was exposed to the public.
This fear of ridicule is one of the problems with the technique, she said. “The biggest drawback with intuition is that you don’t trust it, and you’re afraid you’re going to look silly.”
Harwig, who has written several books about intuitive abilities, including “The Millennium Effect,” suggested that these techniques can be used to complement traditional investigation, especially when the officers hit a dead end.
“Consider it one of the tools in your tool box,” she said.
Sgt. Joe May of the University Police Department said intuition has been around for a long time. “Police nationally and all around the world have been using this for years,”he said. “Courts have recognized certain abilities since Terry v. Ohio forty years ago.”
May added that each officer “will use what they are comfortable with.”