FPSYC3400: What is Investigative Psychology?

Lecture 1

Where did investigative psychology originate?

before the FBI

What were the initial responses of the FBI towards investigative psychology?

• advice given by police medical advisors and other experts to criminal investigations

• offender profiling

• organised/disorganised serial killers

• earliest application to serial killers & focus on psychopathological explanations

What did David Carter find?

realized that there was more contributions that psychology could make to police investigations beyond serial killers & personality profiles

What is the emphasis of investigative psychology?

the reliance on psychological principles, not intuition

What are the main focuses of investigative psychology?

• examination of criminal activities

• understanding of criminal activities

What are the main forces/focal point of investigative psychology?

• criminal behaviour

• info & evidence

• investigative decision making

What are the contributions of investigative psychology?

• management

• investigation

• prosecution of crime

What is IP concerned with?

• The Criminal & Civil Investigative Process

• Investigative Interviewing

• Assessment of Investigative Information

• The Evaluation of Legal Evidence & Preparation of the Case for Court

• Evaluation & Assessment of Investigative Techniques

• Criminal Threat

• Commercial & Civil Investigation & Litigation

The Criminal & Civil Investigative Process

• Offender & geo profiling

• police investigative strategies & decision  making

• suspect elicitation/prioritization

Investigative Interviewing

• Suspect interviewing & interrogation

• witness interviewing

• forensic hypnosis

Assessment of Investigative Information

• Statement validity analysis

• psycholinguistics

• deception detection

• false allegations & confessions

The Evaluation of Legal Evidence and Preparation of the Case for Court

• Eyewitness testimony

• false allegations

• defendant profiling

Evaluation and Assessment of Investigative Techniques

• Jury selection

• jury decision making

• equivocal death & psychological autopsy

Criminal Threat

• Critical incident management

• terrorism

• investigation of criminal threat

Commercial and Civil Investigation and Litigation

• Detection of fraud

• extortion

• cyber-terrorism

Slide 14 (need to know for midterm)

Done

*Know how to label

Central Psychology Questions in Investigative Psychology (Slide 16)

1. Salience

2. Consistency

3. Development & Change

4. Differentiation

5. Inference

Operational Questions Central to Investigative Psychology (Slide 17)

1. Salience

2. Suspect Elicitation

3. Suspect Prioritisation

4. Offender Location

5. Linking Crimes

6. Prediction

7. Investigative Decision-making

8. Information Retrieval

9. Evaluation of Information

10. Preparing a Case

The Investigative Cycle

• information management

• action: decision making

• appropriate inference

Effective Information - Sources of Information

• police records

• crime scene material

• witness reports

• offenders’ own accounts

• psychometric measures

Appropriate Inference

What conclusions can be drawn? 

• Implies a link between certain features of the crime, the offence, the victim, the offender, etc.

•  Only as valid as their theoretical underpinnings

• Often done at the thematic level, not the individual level

• what did and did not occur

 Not just limited to inferences about the characteristics of the offender!

• Consistency

• Differentiation

• Development & Change

What do we need to be aware of when action: decision making?

Heuristic biases

• Distortions:

  • Cognitive processes

  • Distortions through processes of attention of remembering

• Presentational processes

  • Inefficiencies in decision making process

  • How the material is summarised

• Social processes

  • distortions that arise from interpersonal transactions

    Pragmatic processes

  • Misuses of information

Police & Academic Cultures → Differences in:

1. way of knowing

2. way of acting

3. key objectives

Lawrence does more blank practices

pragmatic

Way of knowing

• data vs. evidence

• process vs. product

• profession vs. trade

Way of acting

• refutation vs. confirmation

• publication vs. secrecy

Key Objectives

• knowledge vs. conviction

• posterity vs. career

• ideology vs. politics

What is the polices’ preferred methodologies?

due process

What are psychologists’ preferred methodologies?

scientific method

What is the polices’ explanations of human actions?

individual care

What is the polices’ attitude of human actions?

secrecy

What is the polices’ temporal perspective?

short-term

What are psychologists’ explanations of human actions?

mostly group trends

What are psychologists’ attitude to knowledge?

publication

What are psychologists’ temporal perspective?

long-term

Schematic Summary of Investigative Psychology (Practical Applications): Improve Investigative Process & Detection Rates

• Suspect identification and prioritisation

• Comparative case analysis (linking);

• Offence focusing: identification of salient features of crime to direct investigative effort

• Offending prediction: an offender’s likely development (where, when, what)

• Criminal history matching

• Police investigative decision-making: approaches to improvement

• Criminal network analysis: identify key-role offenders

Schematic Summary of Investigative Psychology (Practical Applications): Improve Investigative Interviewing

• Psychological approaches to interviewing of suspects and witnesses

• Psychological evaluations of evidence: assess credibility and validity of testimony with a view to false allegations and false confessions

• Detection of deception and lying: identification of false crime reports

• Psychological assessments of interviewees, including vulnerable persons

What components must be considered in regards of investigative psychology?

• falsifiability

• transparent processes

• evidence based theory

IP occurs before?

penal system

Schematic Summary of Investigative Psychology (Practical Applications): The Legal Case

• Psychological evaluation of testimony: detect weaknesses in eyewitness evidence

• Defendant profiling: assessments of offence activity and likelihood perpetrated by defendant

• Authorship attribution through Forensic Psycholinguistics

• False rape allegations

• Psychological autopsy

• Entrapment: assessments of appropriateness of police investigative activity

• Jury assessment

IP is within a blank & blank framework

psychological; scientific

Schematic Summary of Investigative Psychology (Practical Applications): Risk/Threat Assessment & Reduction

• Predict risk, particularly in relation to violent offending (including domestic violence, stalking, extortion) using scientific tools and software to improve investigative decision making

• Probity profiling (in corporate context where candidates are considered for senior positions)

• Insurance fraud-related investigations: diversion/reduction, identification

• Investigations into terrorist networks, terrorist radicalization processes, development of suicide bombers

What do the arrows represent in the A → C equation?

inference

One of the biggest contributors to the field of IP was?

increase in openness of police forces to academic work and their embracing of scientific approaches to crime management.

What is the fundamental difference in thought processes between police & academic cultures?

typical modes of action and the central objectives that shape the institutions

Police vs. Academic Cultures - Difference in Preferred Methodologies 

• Police need to consider that everything they do will eventually have to stand up in court, they are concerned with due process.

• While academics are trained in testing alternative hypotheses and progressing forward through learning from failures and are more concerned with using a scientific approach or methodology when collecting and evaluating information.

• Think about the training that police officers received, it’s all focused on the law and how it works; they evaluate their activities in relation to the process of the law.

• Academics have the fundamental commitment to intellectual freedom that is a luxury that the police do not have

While academics are trained in testing alternative hypotheses and progressing forward through learning from failures and are more concerned with using a blank or blank when collecting and evaluating information.

scientific approach; methodology

Police vs. Academic Cultures - Difference in Explanations of Human Actions 

In academic cultures, like IP and psychology generally, we are concerned with the general patterns of criminality, versus one-off cases/experiences.

Even when case studies are used within an academic framework, they are still examined from a framework that is built from general patterns of activity.

When you hear crime stats it’s based on trends; aggregation of many instances of that crime type, or victim, or offender, etc. And from here we compare others to these group trends.

Legal outcome more often than not, lays the emphasis on the individual case and the success/failure of that individual case.

This can make police vulnerable to being influenced more by the unusual or one-off cases, rather than the relevance of general patters of criminality.

In academic cultures, like IP and psychology generally, we are concerned with the blank, versus one-off cases/experiences.

general patterns of criminality 

Legal outcome more often than not, lays the emphasis on the blank and the success/failure of that individual case

individual case

Police vs. Academic Cultures - Publication vs. Secrecy

In the academic realm it’s expected that you publish, which means you submit your research for peer review and contribute to scientific knowledge.

Also, this means when working with others, such as the Police, you provide what you have openly.

Obviously, in a legal setting, especially in an on-going investigation or court case there is a level of necessary and expected discretion.

And this can affect what information is shared between the investigator and the investigative psychologist that might be collaborating with them.

And in the legal setting, hiding information from those who may destroy evidence, or use it to evade detection or capture, is an appropriate thing to do for a detective.

The issue of career development also needs to be considered when we look at the issue of secrecy vs. publication.

For academics, publication advances your career – it’s all about publish or perish!

On the other side, with the police for example, the issue of secrecy is a little more complicated and may depend on where in their career a police officer is – earlier on they tend to use solving cases/making arrests in helping advance their careers and in this respect holding onto information is more necessary because sharing may mean someone else gets the credit.

Later on, once a little more established and at a stage in their career when academic recognition may be of some utility, they may be more forthcoming, and more open to academic collaboration --- THIS IS A GENERALISATION and may not apply to all officers.

Police vs. Academic Cultures - Temporal Perspective 

It’s about the here and now for the police; the public want, or more accurately, demand action from the police, and they demand it now!

While, for academics it’s more of a leisurely pace, if it takes a few months or years to get the results, that’s fine (hence why PhDs are anywhere from 4-7 years on average!).

blank is in the pursuit of knowledge, it is collected in a controlled, scientific manner.

data collected by scientists

Approaches to Information - What is the goal of the data?

to understand the cognitive and affective aspects of the lives of these people, not as a way of obtaining details of the actions that only occurred in a crime or what is only relevant to investigations.

If the data are suspect, then the only issue really is?

that they might only provide only partial support for a particular hypothesis. Even data that isn’t used is often added to future data to help develop the argument further.

Data cumulate to help develop blank and blank

theories; models

What are investigations based on?

the reports that help to build up a picture of the relevant details of what likely happened, which are based on what someone has seen or heard and what that person remembers about that experience.

What is the actual investigation process driven by?

the information that becomes available to the police about that event and associated matters

What is the central challenge of all investigations?

the indirect nature of the material being dealt with means that it is always only partial and can never be assumed to be totally reliable or valid

There is great potential for discrepancies in the information through distortions, inappropriate additions and omissions - What are the problems related to?

the inadequacies of the recording and storage of information, some to the weaknesses of human memory and recall that require the reconstruction of events after the crime, and some to deliberate distortions and falsifications on the part of those involved.

blank is not an integral part of investigative information.

trustworthiness

• peculiar to the investigative context, compared with most other areas of research, that it can often be assumed that some of the information involved will not be trustworthy from an empirical standpoint.

Other limitations of the use of police information include:

•Variation of information collection protocol

•Pragmatic concern rather than research

•Distortion/partial information

•Loss of contextual meaning of behaviour

Other issues between the sharing of information:

•Some officers don’t see the value in studying solved cases, as the central problem of each case is to find the evidence that will lead to a conviction.

•Don’t want to share evidence with academics unless what can be done with it will help to turn it into evidence.

How do we improve police data?

• Standardising recording procedures

• the development of police information systems that provide the framework for what information needs to be collected and which can be used to summarize the most useful and salient features of any particular crime.

• conceptualising and treating this “evidence” as data

• treating the ways in which it is obtained as research processes

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