Psych of Crime Unit 2 Flashcards
Investigative Psychology Offender Profiling Homicide Profiling Homicide Serial Homicide Profiling Serial Homicide Sexual Assault
Investigative Psychology
IP was invented by David Canter in 1990. It is a field of forensic psychology that applies psychological principles to all aspects of police investigations and legal proceedings.
IP is the systematic and scientific study of Investigative Information (It’s retreival, evaluation and utilization), Investigative inferences (conclusions that can be made about criminal behavior from investigative information) and police actions & descisions (their approval and support.
Focus of IP
IP says that police investigations can be more successful if they draw info from the behavioral sciences. So the focuses of IP are:
*development of decision support systems
*Inform investigative procedures and police proceedings.
IP is an investigative cycle of gathering information, making inferences and taking investigative action.
Investigative Inferences
Inferences are suggestions or conclusions that can be drawn about the offender or the crime based on the information available. Like I can infer that this guy hated prostitutes based on the fact that he just stabbed this prostitute in the face and genitals eigtteen times each.
Investigative Inferences MUST be based on research and theory and not just experience. Offender profiling and linkage analysis are not scientific enough to be admissable in court, however.
M.O. vs. Signature Behaviors
M.O. (modus operandi) are behaviors that are involved in crime commision and evading detection.
Signature behaviors are going beyond what is neccesary to commit the crime. There is some emotional or sexual gratification for comitting these crimes.
So Dexter using plastic a putting the body in the bag and dropping it in the ocean is an M.O.
Buffalo Bill skinning women to make a coat is a signature. He didn’t need to skin them to kill them but he skinned them anyway.
Major questions that IP focuses on
- Behavioral Salience - what are the most important behavioral aspects of an offense to focus on? We should focus on things that tell us something about the criminal, the process, or the meaning of the crime. Salience requires us to know about the typical way crimes are carried out and co-occurence of behaviors.
- Consistency - What behaviors are consistent enough to support linkage analysis and offender profiling? Typically, an offender’s behavior is crime scenes is not consistent but the psychological meaning behind it is so consistency focuses on psychological meaning vs. single behavior.
- Development / Change - Do offenders demonstrate development and change across a criminal career?
- Differentiating Offenders-We need to be able to distinguish between the different types of offenders in order to determine if an offender is growing or changing and all the crime scenes we look at are theres or if it’s just simply different criminals.
Behavioral Investigative Advice
IP uses the term BIA instead of offender profiling. This is drawing on clinical research and professional reserach and some experience to make inferences about a crime or criminal based on crime scene evidence. This must be based on research and facts, though. Profiling is used to narrow down a list of the most likely suspects of a crime based on the evidence presented at the crime scene.
Clinical vs. Law vs. IP perspective
The clinical perspective provides LE with info they can’t obtain form the investigation like internal processes. This is more profiling.
Ex. He stabbed her in the face 100 times. He might be a psychopath trying to find his way.
The LE perspective is based on experience and focused more on motivation rather than what they offender was thinking.
Ex. He stabbed her in the face 100 times. Probably because she’s his hooker mother and she owes him money.
The IP perspective is based on theory and research and there is a focus on identifiable behavior that can be observed at the scene. Ex. The offender stabbed this woman in the face 100 times, he must really hate her.
European Witch Hunts
These took place in 1450 to 1750 and were some of the earliest attempts to make inferences about someone based on their actions. They made a profile of a witch (elderly woman, lives on the edge of town, has the mark of the devil).
Cesare Lombroso
Made classifications of people and made a typology of criminals because he assumed that criminals were a different subset of people. He even thought that there were different types of criminals. HIs work was discredited but he was one of the first people to look at CJ as a science and he began the practice of discussing the different types of criminals and different types of offending.
Hans Gross
Gross was a criminal psychologist around 1911. He was one of the first people to begin incorporating psychology into criminal investigations. He believed that the crime scene was an important source of information from which inferences could be made. This was an early precursor to profiling.
Dr. James A. Brussel
Created a profile on a mad bomber who was going around and bombing New York buildings in the 1950’s. Based on crime scene information and letters that the bomber had sent to the police, Brussels made a “profile” with information like the offender’s body type and what kind of industry he may work in. Authorities eventually arrested the bomber who fit into a lot of the things that Brussels had said.
Howard Teton
Howard Teton was impressed with Dr. Brussel’s profliling on the New York bomber and set up training course at the FBI base in Quantico in 1972. From this point, offender profiling became a part of investigations in the US.
Organized crime scenes / Organized offenders
Crime scenes: planned, excercise control over the scene; may have brought a weapon.
Offender: intelligent, employed and seemingly “normal”.
Disorganized crime scene / Disorganized offender
Crime scene: not planned out; happened in a haphazard way. May be some depersonation or mutilation.
Offender: lives alone, knows victim, may experience work, psychological or social difficulties.
