Police Science Dr Podcast, making research accessible to the police practitioner

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What exactly is investigative psychology?

Investigative psychology is a form of applied psychology. That means it is psychology that can be applied to solve real-world problems. investigative psychology tries to understand offenders’ behaviour and the decisions they took so that this understanding can be used to assist in the investigation of crimes. It is also about how best to investigate, and how the police make decisions when they deal with crime. So it looks at both the offender and the police.

 

The term was first coined by Professor David Canter in 1994, who had been studying environmental psychology and then found a link between an offender’s spatial behaviours and their cognitive map, which is a person’s awareness of where they live, frequent and pass through. I will take you through some of the main areas of investigative psychology in this series. Welcome! ...

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What is the difference between forensic psychologists and investigative psychologists? The forensic psychologists are perhaps better known, as these professionals are firmly established within the criminal justice system. They provide psychological treatment to offenders, make assessments on individuals’ (both witnesses’ and suspects’) mental competency or credibility and provide other

advice to the court. The salient difference is that forensic psychologists are more concerned with working with offenders after the investigative process and during their incarceration in terms of their treatment and risk assessment (Canter, D. (2004). Offender Profiling and Investigative Psychology, Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, 1: 1-15). Nevertheless, they can also assist in ongoing investigations by using their expertise in criminal behaviour, especially when

coupled with mental illness. They can advise on how to interview suspects, or witnesses with mental health problems or developmental needs, for example. On the other hand, the investigative psychologist’s input is more useful before conviction, as they can focus their efforts on helping the police identify the most promising suspect(s), as well as getting the best evidence out of them as well as victims and witnesses, in order to convict the right person. A forensic psychologist might then provide an expert opinion at court on the mental health of the perpetrator, as well as assess the level of risk they pose to the public when it is considered whether they can be released from prison or not, after they have served some time behind bars...

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Geographic profiling is a major aspect of investigative psychology. It seeks to use offenders’ decision-making on where and when they choose to offend to either catch them in the act, prioritise

suspects based on where they live or hang out or to seek further intelligence and evidence on the suspect. GP is able to infer an offender’s familiarity with the area where the crime occurred, why

they were there by analysing the locations and timings of offences. It has been found that criminals do not tend to travel far from their base to commit their offences (Bennell, C., & Canter, D. V.

(2002). Linking commercial burglaries by modus operandi: Tests using regression and ROC analysis.

Science & Justice, 42, 153–164); (Goodwill, A. M., & Alison, L. J. (2006). The development of a filter model for prioritising suspects in burglary offences. Psychology, Crime & Law, 12, 395–416)

unless their particular target is not available in their vicinity. The utility of GP really came to the fore in the context of serious serial crimes, when psychologist David Canter assisted police in identifying the so-called ‘Railway Rapists’ who had devolved into murderers in the 1980s (Canter, D. (2003) Mapping Murder: Walking in Killers’ Footsteps. Virgin Books)....

 

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Crime linkage is the practice of identifying which different offences were committed by the same offender. For example, if you have a whole lot of unsolved burglaries, you want to find out which

offences are attributable to the same person. That is because you might have some information about the perpetrator from one crime, for example a shoe print that points to a male with a certain

shoe size and weight. See if you could identify which other offences you think are linked to that same person. Perhaps some of those have other information about the burglar, such as a witness

seeing that he has a tattoo on one hand, and in this way you can put together more and more pieces of the puzzle. You now have good reasons to believe that the offender who is responsible for

this particular series is of a certain gender, weight, has a certain shoe size which might point to his approximate height, and he has a tattoo on one hand. If you allocate one of those pieces to the

wrong puzzle (i.e. to the wrong series of offences), you unnecessarily hinder the investigation, so it is important to link the right offences to the right person.....

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Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

 

Eyewitness testimony is the evidence that you get from someone who has witnessed a crime. Instinctively, people tend to believe and rely on it to a great extent. It can be seen as a factor that

can sway a judge and/or jury to establish the guilt or innocence of a defendant (Loftus, E.F. (1979), Eyewitness Testimony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). It is often used in the initial

stages of an investigation, for example when a witness reports the perpetrator was of a certain appearance, then the police will be looking for potential suspects who match that description.

Witnesses’ evidence is also used in court when either the prosecution or defence try to convince the jury that a certain person is or is not guilty. However, whilst in the past, the criminal justice process has relied greatly on eye witness accounts and still does, over the past few decades we have learned more and more about how unreliable this kind of evidence can be. It took DNA

evidence to exonerate a number of innocent people who had been convicted based on eyewitness evidence (Wells, G.L. & Olson, E.A. (2003) Eye Witness Testimony, Annual Review of Psychology,

Vol. 54: 277 – 295) And mistakes made unwittingly by eye witnesses are a substantial cause of wrongful convictions (Scheck, B., Neufeld, P. & Dwyer, J. (2000) Actual Innocence: Five Days to

Execution and other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group).....

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Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

 

In the olden days, investigative interviews, also known as suspect interviews or interrogations, were

very coercive processes in which accusations were shouted at the detainee who was also sometimes

subjected to violence and intimidation by the interrogator. Whilst this is still the case today in

some countries and make sure you never get arrested there, interviewing practice in the UK is

much more evidence-based now, which means it employs methods that have been shown to work

better. By ‘work’ I mean not scaring innocent people into taking the blame for something they haven’t

done and enabling police interviewers to identify when someone seems to be lying, at least in

theory....

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Full transcripts of each episode complete with key learning points, timestamps and references are available on the site above on the 'Read' page. This page is pass-word protected and you can get access by joining the mailing list.

 

Offender profiling is a prioritisation tool. When the police are looking for an unknown offender in a similar vein to how you might look for a needle in a haystack, effective profiling suggests to the

police which out of the many haystacks they should look in first, based on a behavioural analysis of the case. Whilst offender profiling has been this very mysterious and glamorous thing that

near-psychic people do in films and TV shows, in real life there have been a number of successes and a number of failures. Investigative psychology encompasses a lot more than offender profiling,

but even that it does with a scientific method. In the UK, the people who do the actual offender profiling, the National Crime Agency’s behavioural investigative advisers (BIAs), use offender profiling as only one of the tools they offer police forces, amongst several others. Providing behavioural investigative advice (BIA) is the practice of using the individual characteristics of the offence as well as the unknown offender’s behaviour and choices that can be gleaned from the crime site or the victim’s account, to advance the investigation....

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What is Investigative Psychology?

Part 1 of 7 of the ‘What is Investigative Psychology?’ series

 

What exactly is investigative psychology?

Investigative psychology is a form of applied psychology. That means it is psychology that can be applied to solve real-world problems. investigative psychology tries to understand offenders’ behaviour and the decisions they took so that this understanding can be used to assist in the investigation of crimes. It is also about how best to investigate, and how the police make decisions when they deal with crime. So it looks at both the offender and the police...

From the 2020 Virtual Conference.

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Professor Sherman is the Director of the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing and the Wolfson Professor of Criminology Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, where he is also past Director (2012–2017) of the Institute of Criminology. Currently serving as Director of the Institute’s Jerry Lee Centre of Experimental Criminology, his 1998 Police Foundation Lecture on ‘Evidence-Based Policing’ is widely recognised as the foundation of a global movement generating professional societies for evidence-based policing in the UK, Australia-New Zealand, Canada and the US, now with over 5,000 members. Professor Sherman has served as the Honorary President of the Society of Evidence-Based Policing (UK) since its formation in 2010, and is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing launched in 2017. He is also Director of the Cambridge Police Executive Programme, offering a part-time Master’s degree in Applied Criminology and Police Management at the University of Cambridge with over 170 students from ten countries.  

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In this talk, Professor Sherman suggests how we could identify police officers who are most likely to kill someone in advance.