Michael Andrew Arntfield is a Canadian academic, author, criminologist, true crime broadcaster and podcaster, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, and a Fulbright scholar. He is also a workplace violence harassment consultant, threat assessor, and former police officer.[1][2] From 1999 to 2014, Arntfield was employed with the London, Ontario, Police Service as a police officer and detective. In 2014, Arntfield left policing to accept a customized academic appointment at the University of Western Ontario. Today, Arntfield teaches "literary criminology," a term he adopted combined English literature and crime studies program.
In 2011, the same year Arntfield completed his Ph.D., he founded the Cold Case Society. The Cold Case Society at the University of Western Ontario uses students and faculty from multiple disciplines, as well as subject matter experts and lawyers from the North American community, to analyze unsolved crimes and other failed investigations utilizing the lens of new technology and emerging investigative methodologies. The Cold Case Society has since partnered with The Murder Accountability Project.,[3] where he is also a Director. The Murder Accountability Project's serial offender algorithm to identify and crowdsource new cases, all while matching students to investigate leads in over 200,000 unsolved murders still officially on the books.
Arntfield has appeared as a subject matter expert, host, writer and producer. His work has been and continues to be the inspiration for several television productions.
From 2013-2016 Arntfield was retained as a host, writer, producer, and consultant for the true crime series To Catch a Killer, initially produced for the Oprah Winfrey Network and on subsidiaries of the A&E Network and CBS across Europe, Asia, and Oceania.[1] and later syndicated internationally.
In May 2015, Arntfield was retained by HBO's British distributor to be the spokesman for the DVD and digital release of the true-crime documentary: The Jinx and was used to explain to the European media the investigative value of documentary journalism with respect to cold cases.
From 2016-2018, Arntfield was attached to an Oxygen Network production that, upon rebranding as a crime broadcaster, attached him to a project loosely based on his work with the Murder Accountability Project; the series was later canceled for unspecified reasons after filming a pilot in Atlanta over the course of 2018.[citation needed]
In 2019, Arntfield appeared as an expert and personality in the Investigation Discovery series Children of the Snow detailing the Oakland County Child Killer case and he was also retained as the chief expert for season two of the A&E Europe series Homicide: Hours to Kill.[citation needed] He is also a recurring expert who appears on a number of CBC series such as the long-running investigative documentary series The Fifth Estate and The National.[citation needed]
Various production companies have optioned Arntfield's life rights as a detective-professor hybrid. He remains attached as a producer and writer for the television adaptions of his true crime books, which are currently still in development.
In addition to the above-mentioned television appearances, Arntfield has also appeared on A Perfect World on NBC Peacock and the Hunt for the Chicago Strangler on Investigation Discovery. He continues to appear on several television series where he shares his expertise with various audiences, including the ongoing Investigation Discovery Series, Time to Kill.
Arntfield has also authored or co-authored over a dozen books, including the best-selling and controversial Murder City for which he is arguably best known.[5] In the book he advances a hypothesis, often employing an epistolary format through the use of a now deceased detective's original diary notes, that over a specific interval in the 1960s and 1970s, the city of London, Ontario spawned or otherwise housed more serial killers per capita than any city in Canada, and likely beyond.[6] In 2015, it was announced that Emmy Award-winning Sullivan Entertainment had acquired the television rights to the book, and that a dramatic network series was in development even ahead of the book's release date.[citation needed] Arntfield is signed-on to serve as both co-executive producer and technical consultant for the series.[5]
Arntfield currently holds a Canadian federal research grant to study the sociolinguistic underpinnings of cyberbullying, trolling, and other forms of cyberdeviance and electronic harassment.[citation needed] Having collected over 40,000 samples of cyberbullying text from news message board and social media sites and analyzing their contents, Arntfield has published a number of peer-reviewed journal articles and research papers appearing in textbooks in which he argues that cyberdeviance in many cases has a distinct sexual and fantasy-based component.[citation needed] He argues that cyberbullying and acts of trolling should therefore be understood as being more akin to a paraphilia than traditional physical bullying.[7] In 2016, Arntfield will serve as the visiting Fulbright Research Chair in crime and literature at the English department at Vanderbilt University after being selected as part of a rigorously competitive process overseen by the U.S. Department of State.[citation needed] He will be furthering his research on literary criminology and cyberbullying while there, as well as developing a Vanderbilt iteration of his Cold Case Society.[citation needed] He will return to Western in the fall of 2016.[8][6]
Arntfield has been honoured numerous times for his scholarly work. He is a Fulbright scholar who has received multiple excellence in teaching awards. In 2018, he was awarded Western Humanitarian of the Year.
Arntfield has been retained to consult on-site for a wide range of clients across multiple sectors, including media outlets such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), government and NGO entities from the Province of Ontario to Health Care Organizations, as well as industry leaders in risk detection, like CarProof Vehicle History Reports.
Arntfield provides investigative training, interviewing strategies, and statement analysis for some of North America's leading corporate investigation firms, mostly with respect to workplace violence and harassment, as well as risk assessments regarding high-risk terminations.