Shawn Spencer works as a freelance consultant to the Santa Barbara Police Department, along with his business partner and lifelong best friend
Burton "Gus" Guster. Like many fictional detectives, he is very observant and skilled in deductive reasoning. However, he pretends that his skills are due to him being a psychic. Shawn comes from a family of
police officers. His father, Henry, is a decorated sergeant who trained Shawn from childhood to be hyper-observant. This is drawn loosely from the childhood of series creator
Steve Franks, who was also born into a family of police officers and whose father "was training [Franks] in his own way to follow his footsteps." Franks' father would ask him how many people were wearing hats in a restaurant, a tactic Henry employs in the series pilot. In the pilot episode, Shawn earned money by using his observational skills to call in tips for the police. However, he started acting as a consultant for the police because they suspected him of being involved in one of the crimes he was reporting a tip for, not believing that he could have known the information from just watching a news broadcast. ==Characterization==