Midterm 1 Flashcards
What is police psychology?
Involves the application of psychology to policing but also includes research done with or on behalf of the police in order to inform applied practice.
What’s tasks did Aumiller and Corey find?
Assessment, Intervention, Operational, Consulting.
What do police psychologists do in Canada?
Study found that most were satisfied and spent most of their time on pre-employment evaluations and fitness for duty evaluations.
What is evidence based policing?
The idea that policing should be based on scientific evidence about what works best and move away from judgements based on untested assumptions.
Challenges in police psychology?
Lack of funding from police agencies, difficult security clearance procedures, limited officer cooperation, miscommunication between parties and officer lack of knowledge about psychology.
Triple T Strategy
Sherman, 2013: Targeting, testing tracking
Key elements of EBP
Research must be usable/relevant.
Involve police in research.
Identify what works.
EMMIE (Crime Reduction Toolkit)
Effect
Mediators
Moderators
Implementation
Economic Assessment
Why don’t prisons work?
They increase the Big 4 risk factors.
Punishment CAN work if delivered immediately and consistently, this is not the case in prisons.
What did studies find about Scared Straight and Scared Stiff programs?
Scared Straight increased youth crime, Scared Stiff had no effect.
What are some problems in police recruitment?
Understudied, currently high retirement rate with a youth lack of interest in policing and a previously unseen rate of turnover.
What are essential requirements to be a cop in Canada?
Canadian citizen, can operate a firearm, have a driver’s license and are willing to relocate.
What are the 3 stages of police research?
Job analysis.
Construction.
Validation.
What are some issues with Job Analysis?
How to identify KSAs, are KSAs stable over time, are they different for different jobs? Many KSAs can also be further broken down.
What are some issues with Construction?
Should use tools be used or should we develop new ones? And should they be police-specific or directed to the general population, finding tools that are relevant and valid, difficulty assessing KSAs.
What are some issues with Validation?
Deciding a scale, accounting for people faking good, range restriction.
What are some police screening measures?
MMPI, cognitive aptitude tests, situational tests.
Why is validity on police selection measures low?
Test is closer temporally to the academy than actual job performance, socialization may impact on the job actions, and often situational factors cause a dramatic change in performance. Pre-hire tests cannot predict these situations.
NUTS
Novelty
Unpredictability
Threat to ego
Sense of control
What are some moderators of police stress?
Training to cope, experience with the stressor, support from others, personality factors and coping strategies.
Consequences of stress
Weight gain, cardiovascular disease, depression, PTSD, burnout, low morale, absenteeism.
Demand-control-support
High job demand + low support + low control = stress.
Person-environment fit model
Less compatible = more stress
Selye’s GAS model
Alarm –> Resistance –> Exhaustion
What are methods of studying police stress?
Self report, psychological, physiological, meta-analysis.
What interventions exist of police stress?
CISD, CISM, peer support, CBT, rationale emotive therapy, exercise.
Coherence Advantage Program
Stress, resilience and performance enhancement program, gives skills to regulate mental, emotional and physical systems. Specific techniques, easy to learn and employ, shows significant benefits.
Suggested moderators of police stress
Length/type of intervention, population, gender, years of police experience. Patterson et al. concluded that moderators and interventions had no significant effect.
Investigative Psychology
Developed by David Canter, looks at how to assist police with scientific, empirical applications of psychology to policing.
Crime Linkage Analysis
Behavioural evidence that tells the investigators sothing about the person who committed the crime. Allows the police to obtain more severe jail sentences, pool evidence and resources and identify more criminals.
Comparative case analysis
Large sample of crimes analysed for potential links.
Crime linkage
Index and other offences given to an analyst to determine if they’re linked.
Assumptions of crime linkage
Behavioural stability, behavioural distinctiveness.
Theory of crime linkage
Rooted in personality psych, personality traits and situational factors impact behaviour, cognition and affect are moderators. Distinctiveness results from offenders understanding and processing information differently, based on their learning history.
Modus Operandi
What the offender has to do in order to get away with the crime
Behavioural signature
What the offender has to do to feel fulfillment from the crime, not necessary for the completion of it.
Linkage databases
Designed to assist linkage and reduce linkage blindness, Clifford Olsen and Paul Bernardo were important CAN cases for this.
Potential responses from a yes/no diagnostic task
Hit, False Alarm, True Negative, False Negative,
When is linkage the most accurate?
Behaviours related to the offender, not situationally determined, are more accuartely profiled. Where and when of crimes is important, and control behaviours have some significance, especially in sexual crimes. Also higher in interpersonal rather than property crimes.
Problems with linkage?
Over-reliance on solved and serial crimes, USA and UK cases, property crimes and having low ecological validity.
What are the assumptions of criminal profiling?
Behavioural stability/similarity, homology.
What is the theory behind profiling?
Latent traits are assumed to be the driving force behind all behaviours, not just criminal, and this, crime scenes will show behavioural evidence of that individual.
Deductive profiling
Based solely on evidence left at the crime scene.
Inductive profiling
Based on what we know about other offenders who have committed similar, solved crimes. Most profilers use a combination of both, but most are inductive at their core.
Investigative psychology approach to profiling
Determines if structure exists in the way (observable behaviours) or the background characteristics (observable characteristics) of offender. Then, identify relationships between actions and characteristics.
What does research say about profiling?
Most papers think it isn’t valid, with little empirical evidence to support it. Allison et al found that only 28% of statements in a sample of profiles were actually personality predictors.
