Forensic Psychology Study Notes

Criminal Behaviour: Examines the profile of those who commit crimes and the implications.
Increasing Crime Rate: Trend monitoring and causes of crime increase.
Recidivism: The likelihood of re-offending and its implications for justice.
Incarceration Rates: Analysis of incarceration as a measure of criminal justice effectiveness.

Engaged in:
- Investigating crime to assist police in capturing criminals.
- Investigating the causes of crime to recommend policy changes and assess societal impact.
Functions include:
- Conducting empirical research as academics.
- Acting as consultants interviewing suspects, victims, and witnesses.
- Utilizing video and AI-based identification software.
- Facilitating courts for efficient justice delivery.

Controlling Behaviour:
- Law seeks immediate, direct, explicit behavior control, while psychology takes an indirect, long-term, implicit approach concerning behavior analyses.
Level of Analyses:
- Law focuses on individual behavior whereas psychology looks at general population trends.
Free Will vs. Determinism:
- Law assumes behaviors are the result of free will.
- Psychology argues behaviors arise from a combination of genetic, developmental, environmental, societal, perceptual, and cognitive factors.
Nature of Evidence:
- Law operates on common-sense understandings (e.g., beyond a reasonable doubt).
- Psychology relies on empirical, observable, and objective data.

Exploration of whether machine learning can refine brain-reading technologies to identify lying or predict criminal behavior.
Ethical questions regarding the endorsement of "objective" measures for assessing intentions and predicting future criminal acts.

Example: Redding, Pennsylvania
- Historical context: Economic decline from steel and coal industry, leading to high poverty rates (41% in 2011).
- Impact: Reduction in police staff due to decreased funding despite high crime rates.
- Implementation: Crime prediction software was introduced to direct patrols into areas identified as high-risk, resulting in a 23% reduction in burglaries (year after implementation).
- Critique: Software is “race-blind,” leading to increased policing in impoverished areas.

Part 1 Crimes: Violent crimes (e.g., homicide, arson, assault).
Part 2 Crimes: Lesser offenses (e.g., vagrancy, drug offenses).
Consideration of how algorithm inclusion of Part 2 crimes may perpetuate negative cycles of criminality in impoverished communities due to increased police presence.

Questions raised about the relevance of psychology in law enforcement and the effectiveness of traditional methodologies.
Exploration of how psychological insights can be utilized to improve outcomes in law enforcement practices.

Sequential vs. Simultaneous Lineups:
- Most police procedures utilize simultaneous presentations.
- Lab accuracy shows better results for sequential lineups (Lindsay & Wells, 1985).
- A meta-analysis indicated simultaneous identification accuracy is favored in ideal conditions, but such advantages diminish when simulating real-world scenarios.
- Sequential lineups lead to better correct rejections than simultaneous formats (Steblay et al., 2001).

Common errors during witness interviews include:
- Excessive closed-ended questions.
- Interrupting witnesses too frequently.
- Following a strictly predetermined order of questions without flexibility.
Historical note: No formal training for officers on proper interviewing techniques until the late 1990s (Wells et al., 2000).

Aimed at enhancing dynamics between the interviewer and the eyewitness.
Establishing rapport encourages more honest testimony from eyewitnesses.
Techniques to enhance memory recall include focusing on attention, concentration, retrieval, and employing mnemonic strategies (like asking relevant questions pre- and post-event to aid memory retrieval).
Findings indicate cognitive interviewing can lead to a 35-75% improvement in effectiveness in lab settings (Wells et al., 2000).

Selecting appropriate distractors (fillers) to reduce bias in identifications.
Providing instructions that the perpetrator “may or may not” be present in the lineup, which introduced a 42% decrease in mistaken identifications when the perpetrator was absent (based on a meta-analysis of 22 tests with 2588 participants).
Favoring sequential lineups for improved accuracy.
The correlation between eyewitness confidence and accuracy averages around r = 0.29; however, it is subject to variability based on viewing conditions and feedback effects (Wells et al., 2000).

Consideration of what knowledge gained from introductory psychology could potentially inform practices and perspectives among law officials.