Midterm Flashcards
What do police rely on in their investigations?
Police rely on witnesses, victims, and suspects to fill in details about crimes
Evidence is often collected through interrogations
What are the two goals of a police interrogation?
- Obtain a confession
- Gain information that will further the investigation (e.g., the location of evidence)
What’s the most common interrogation method?
The Reid model
What are the 3 stages of the Reid model?
- Gather evidence
- Conduct a non-accusatorial interview to assess deception (guilt)
- Conduct an accusatorial interrogation to obtain a confession (9 steps)
What does the third stage involve and what was it designed for?
The third stage involves 9 steps to break down the suspect’s resistance to confessing
Designed to make the anxiety associated with deception greater than the anxiety associated with confessing
What are the two categories of techniques included in the Reid model?
Minimization and Maximization techniques
What’s a minimization technique?
Soft sell tactics that provide a sense of false security
What’s a maximization technique?
Scare tactics that attempt to intimidate suspects
What are the potential problems with the Reid model?
- deception detection
- comprehension of legal rights
- investigator bias
- false confessions
What’s involved with Mr. Big?
- Undercover officers
- Lure suspect into organized crime
- Get suspect to commit minor crimes
- Needs to be interviewed by the boss (“Mr. Big”)
- Confesses to something more serious (the crime under investigation)
- Seems to work quite well
What is a false confession?
A false confession occurs when an individual confesses to a crime they did not commit or exaggerates their involvement in a crime they did commit
What are the three types of false confessions?
- Voluntary
- Coerced-compliant
- Coerced-internalized
What is a voluntary false confession?
It occurs without being prompted by the police. Can be done because of a desire for notoriety, an inability to distinguish fact from fantasy, an attempt to protect the real offender, or a need to be punished
What is a coerced-compliant false confession?
It occurs in response to a desire to escape further interrogation or to gain a promised reward. The confessor knows that they did not commit the crime
What is a coerced-internalized false confession?
It results from suggestive interrogations and the confessor comes to believe they committed the crime.
People suffering from brain impairments, extreme anxiety, or confusion may be more susceptible
What is criminal profiling?
Technique for identifying the personality and behavioural features of an offender based on an analysis of the crimes they have committed
When is criminal profiling used?
It’s used in serial crime investigations, particularly homicide and sexual assault/rape
What are the goals of criminal profiling?
- To prioritize suspects
- To develop new lines of enquiry
- To flush out offenders
- To determine risk
- To provide interrogation advice
What are the two approaches to criminal profiling?
Deductive profiling and inductive profiling
What is the most widely known inductive profiling approach?
The organized-disorganized model
What are the potential problems with profiling?
- Lacks a strong theoretical base (trait v. state)
- Profiles are too ambiguous to be useful
- Professional profilers are not usually more accurate
What is geographic profiling?
It involves an analysis of crime scene locations in order to determine the most probable area of offender residence
What are geographic profiling systems?
Geographic profiling systems rely on mathematical models of spatial behaviour
Computer programs are used, but people can be trained easily to figure out the same information
