I Lack the Arrogance to Ignore Details. I Am Not Law Enforcement per se.

“I lack the arrogance to ignore details. I am not law enforcement per se.”

When I first said those words, and more importantly fully understood them, I realised how much they capture my outlook on crime, justice, and truth. To ignore details is to presume the story is already complete. Arrogance, in this sense, is a refusal to be troubled by nuance. Yet criminal history repeatedly shows us that details, sometimes almost absurdly small ones, have decided the fate of cases, the liberty of individuals, and the legacy of justice itself.

When Details Crack Cases

Take the BTK killer, Dennis Rader. For decades, he taunted law enforcement with letters, evading capture while maintaining the façade of a suburban church leader. What eventually led to his downfall was not a grand breakthrough but a technical detail: a metadata trace on a floppy disk he sent to police. The arrogance of assuming digital files were untraceable became his undoing. Law enforcement, refusing to ignore the detail, connected the disk to a church computer linked to Rader himself.

Dennis Rader (known as the BTK killer).

Or consider the case of Ted Bundy. Bundy was charismatic, manipulative, and careful, yet it was the detail of a Volkswagen Beetle that tied him to several disappearances. Witnesses recalled the distinctive car. Later, fibres from the upholstery provided corroborating evidence. What seemed a banal detail, a car too common to matter, became a cornerstone of conviction.

Ted Bundy’s VW Beatle.

Details, in other words, are not ornamental. They are decisive.

When Details Are Ignored

But the opposite is also true: the arrogance to ignore details has led to wrongful convictions.

Take the Birmingham Six in the United Kingdom, accused in 1974 of IRA pub bombings. Their convictions rested on coerced confessions and forensic tests later shown to be deeply flawed. The detail that should have mattered, the unreliability of those tests, was overlooked. Arrogance in rushing to secure convictions eclipsed the obligation to interrogate the particulars. It took sixteen years before the truth was admitted and the convictions quashed.

The Birmingham Six.

In the United States, the Central Park Five (now known as the Exonerated Five) suffered a similar fate. Details inconsistent with their coerced confessions, DNA evidence, timelines that did not align, were disregarded in favour of a narrative that fit public pressure. Only years later, when Matias Reyes confessed and his DNA matched the crime, were the men exonerated. Justice had failed precisely because arrogance dismissed inconvenient details.

Central Park Five (now known as the Exonerated Five).

These cases remind us that the cost of ignoring details is not theoretical. It is measured in wasted years, stolen lives, and public trust corroded.

The Philosophy of Humility

To lack the arrogance to ignore details is not merely a methodological point, it is a philosophical stance. It is to admit that the world does not reveal itself in neat outlines, that truth often lives in the overlooked and the inconvenient.

Philosophers like Simone Weil spoke of attention as the rarest and purest form of generosity. To attend to detail is to give the world, and the people within it, the dignity of being seen as they are, not as we expect them to be. In crime and law, this is not sentimentality; it is necessity.

Simone Weil.

The arrogance to ignore details breeds both overconfidence and blindness. It imagines that we already know, and thus need not look. But humility before the detail reminds us that certainty is fragile, that human lives are intricate, and that justice demands a kind of patience that arrogance cannot muster.

Law and the Precision of Detail

The law itself insists on detail. The wording of a caution, the exact phrasing of a statute, the admissibility of evidence, all hinge on precision. Wrongful convictions often begin where detail is treated as trivial. Conversely, acquittals and appeals often succeed when defence lawyers attend to what others missed: a contradictory timeline, a misfiled report, a forensic test administered incorrectly.

In this sense, detail is not pedantry, it is justice in practice.

Witness, Not Enforcer

And still, I remind myself: I am not law enforcement per se. I do not carry a badge or a warrant. My attentiveness does not operate under statutory power. It is closer to philosophy than policing.

I am a witness, not a judge. A student of patterns, not their enforcer. My role, if it can be called a role, is to notice, to refuse the arrogance of dismissal, to remind myself and others that details matter not only in criminal cases but in human life more broadly.

Conclusion

So yes, I repeat it with conviction: “I lack the arrogance to ignore details. I am not law enforcement per se.”

The BTK killer fell because of a metadata fragment. Bundy was tied to his crimes through a car and its fibres. Wrongful convictions, from the Birmingham Six to the Central Park Five, endured because details were arrogantly brushed aside. The stakes of attentiveness could not be clearer.

To lack the arrogance to ignore details is to practise humility in the face of complexity. It is to accept that justice, truth, and human understanding live not in sweeping generalities but in the small, stubborn particulars. And though I am not law enforcement per se, I stand in solidarity with all who choose vigilance over arrogance, detail over dismissal, and truth over the comfort of simplicity.