A blind Sherlock Holmes: Fighting crime with acute listening
"ANTWERP, Belgium: Sacha van Loo, 36, is not your typical cop. He wields a white cane instead of a gun. And from the purr of an engine on a wiretap, he can discern whether a suspect is driving a Peugeot, a Honda or a Mercedes.
Van Loo is one of Europe's newest weapons in the global fight against terrorism and organized crime: a blind Sherlock Holmes, whose disability allows him to spot clues sighted detectives don't see."
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"The blind police unit, which became operational in June, originated after van Thielen heard about a blind police officer in the Netherlands, and was looking at ways to improve community outreach. He made the connection that blind people could prove more adept than the sighted at listening to and interpreting wiretaps. That idea, he says, was given added impetus after the Belgian government passed a law a few years ago giving the police extended powers to use wiretaps in the investigation of 37 areas of crime, including terrorism, murder, organized crime and the abduction of minors."
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Amazing!
"The police also recognized that blind officers like van Loo could be particularly valuable in counterterrorism investigations because wiretap recordings - derived from a phone tap or bug placed in the safe house of a terrorist group - are often muffled by loud background noise, requiring a highly trained ear to discern voices. Alain Grignard, a senior counterterrorism officer at the Brussels Federal Police, notes that wiretaps proved instrumental in the recent arrests of a large terrorist cell in Belgium recruiting for the insurgency in Iraq."
