"Thinking like a criminal is the best quality a cop can have"?

Being able to put yourself in another's shoes does help in police work. It does not matter if it is in a criminals shoes or a victims. It depends on what is needed at the time.

As a beat cop one of the things you do is create scenarios. What would a bank robber do? How would he try to escape from this or that location? and on and on. it is called planing for the future.

I can agree about no giving opinions on what happened in a specific case without actually witnessing it or investigating it.

The guy was a corrections officer and not the police. I would think that he would have to think like a criminal even more than the police, just to survive and anticipate the criminals actions in his daily work.

Corrections and police are two different parts of the law enforcement world. I never even thought about going into corrections, I don't think I would have liked it. It needs a different mind set then most police do.

Yes, I definitely agree. I am also a Corrections Officer in a max prison. You see several different faces on each inmate. They are masters at lying and subterfuge. We deal with human predators on a daily basis and until I learned to think like they think a lot of little things got past me. This was a lesson taught many years ago and is now totally automatic. Yes, it taints my basic thought patterns and I tend to see things in a black and white issue with little or no grey. I believe virtually nothing of what I am told ( My favorite line to new Officers I am training is "Do you know how I know he is lying? His lips are moving") and trust my instincts followed by investigation. So yes, to catch the criminal, you need to be able to think as they do.

I hope this helps and you can find it useful

Thinking is something not a lot of cops do. Your quote is redundant.