Psychology & Law 2000words essay
Sharonhy
Session1_TopicTwo.pptxCRM389 Topic Two: Investigation & Policing
How do the Police Investigate Crimes?
When police officers are called to a crime scene, they may be lucky in that the perpetrator is still on the premises. In that case, the police take the criminal away and focus on building a case against them that stands up in court.
In situations where the criminal not at the scene of the crime police investigations are necessary to solve the crime. Such investigations include:
Examine the crime scene to collect evidence
Interview witness (es)
Observation of the crime scene
Physical and forensic evidence is collected
Custodial interrogations of suspects
Law Enforcement and Policing
In criminology, law enforcement and policing have very important differences:
Law enforcement requires an unwavering adherence to rules and procedures. It is a focus on the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. Citations are issued, arrests are made, and force is employed with little regard for the reason or meaning behind a particular law or policy.
Policing, on the other hand, means an approach to crime fighting through community service and problem-solving. The idea of policing requires a holistic approach to community service, taking into account the problems that plague a community, and working within that community to solve those problems.
The Origins of Modern Policing
In the early history of policing, individual citizens were largely responsible for maintaining law and order among themselves. Shire reeves, or sheriffs, were employed full-time to oversee law enforcement activities within their shires in England and their counties in the colonies
Sir Robert Peel, a Member of Parliament who served as Home Secretary for the United Kingdom in the 1820s, established the Metropolitan Police Services in London.
The concept of a centralised, professional police force was initially met with a tremendous amount of resistance. The public feared that a police force would essentially behave as another arm of the military. To overcome this opposition, Peel laid the framework for what a police force should be comprised of, and how a good police officer should conduct himself; hence the primary principles of policing was born.
Police Corruption
Police corruption is the misuse of police authority for personal gain. Personal gain can mean monetary payment or any other type of benefit. The benefit must be gained illegally and as a result of the officer’s position or authority.
Police corruption hurts both law enforcement and the community. Such behaviour damages the police’s public image and undermine a community’s trust of law enforcement
Types of Police Corruption
Bribery is giving or receiving any item of value in order to influence an officer. For instance, an officer might accept money in exchange for not arresting a suspect. The bribe is usually money.
Extortion is also somewhat common and is similar to bribery. Extortion is threatening someone in order to obtain money or property. Here, an officer might threaten to have someone falsely prosecuted if that person does not pay the officer. Just remember that to extort means to threaten. Extortion always involves a threat.
Reasons for Police Corruption
There are many reasons as to why police corruption occurs. Some of the most basic reasons are: low salaries; poor working conditions; a high degree of formalism in the police force; poor recruitment and selection procedures (the Rotten Apple Theory); a lack of training programmes; and ample opportunities for corruption due to inadequate controls.
The Rotten Apple Theory is a theory of police corruption that views police deviance as the work of isolated individuals, i.e. “rotten apples”, who evade detection during the screening and selection process. Once inside a police agency rotten apples prey on an unsuspecting public to further their selfish needs or misuse their authority
Effects of Police Corruption
Political Effects: Civilians within the jurisdiction look to lawmakers to enact justice against the officers involved. If the instance of corruption happens to fall on an election year, a re-election campaign may be lost, particularly if the government in question fails to take action against this corruption.
Social Effects: Citizens, especially those who, or know someone who, has been victimised by certain types of corruption, tend to see police officers as enemy forces. An attitude of “us versus them” begins to develop. This is especially prevalent among inner city minorities, where stereotyping and racial targeting seem to be the norm.
Economic Effects: Investigation and litigation costs may be high in an effort to prosecute errant officers as they would any other accused person, and the officer would have to engage his own lawyers to represent him. Training of new officers also adds to financial considerations.
Noble Cause Corruption
Noble cause corruption suggests that people will use unethical or illegal means to attain desirable goals, a result which appears to benefit the greater good.
Such corruption forms when someone is convinced of their righteousness, and will do anything within their powers to achieve the desired result.
An example of noble cause corruption is police misconduct "committed in the name of good ends" or neglect of due process through "a moral commitment to make the world a safer place to live."
Conditions for such corruption usually occur where individuals feel no administrative accountability, lack morale and leadership, and lose faith in the criminal justice system. These conditions can be compounded by arrogance and weak supervision.
Luna v. Massachusetts
On 17 February 1988, officers from the Boston Police Department executed a search warrant at the home of Albert Lewin. As they entered the premises, Lewin shot and killed Officer Sherman Griffiths. Lewin was charged with murder, but charges were later dismissed when it was discovered that the affidavit for search warrant filed by Detective Carlos A. Luna was based upon false information and a fictitious informant. Luna was indicted for perjury, conspiracy and filing false police reports while all the charges against Lewin, including the murder of a police officer, were dismissed. The case outlines consequences of noble cause motivations when officers ignore the Constitution and fabricate evidence in the pursuit of justice.
Criminal Profiling
Definition:
Offender profiling, also known as criminal profiling, is an investigative strategy used by law enforcement agencies to identify likely suspects and has been used by investigators to link cases that may have been committed by the same perpetrator. Multiple crimes may be linked to a specific offender and the profile may be used to predict the identified offender's future actions.
In the 1980s, most researchers believed offender profiling was relevant only to sex crimes, like serial rape or sexual homicide, but since the late 1990s research has been published to support its application to arson (1998), and then later terrorism (2000) and burglary (2017).
Criminal Profiling: Science v Art
Nowadays profiling rests, sometimes uneasily, somewhere between law enforcement and psychology. As a science, it is still a relatively new field with few set boundaries or definitions. Its practitioners don't always agree on methodology or even terminology. The term "profiling" has caught on among the general public, largely due to movies like "The Silence of the Lambs" and TV shows like "Profiler." But the FBI calls its form of profiling "criminal investigative analysis"; one prominent forensic psychologist calls his work "investigative psychology"; and another calls his "crime action profiling."
Criminal Profiling: The Beginning
For 16 years, "mad bomber" George Metesky eluded New York City police. Metesky planted more than 30 small bombs around the city between 1940 and 1956, hitting movie theaters, phone booths and other public areas.
In 1956, the frustrated investigators asked psychiatrist James Brussel, New York State's assistant commissioner of mental hygiene, to study crime scene photos and notes from the bomber. Brussel came up with a detailed description of the suspect: He would be unmarried, foreign, self-educated, in his 50s, living in Connecticut, paranoid and with a vendetta against Con Edison--the first bomb had targeted the power company's 67th street headquarters.
While some of Brussel's predictions were simply common sense, others were based on psychological ideas. For instance, he said that because paranoia tends to peak around age 35, the bomber, 16 years after his first bomb, would now be in his 50s. The profile proved dead on: It led police right to Metesky, who was arrested in January 1957 and confessed immediately.
Profiling: Modus Operandi
A modus operandi or MO refers to the method or procedure that a criminal uses when committing a crime. It comes from the Latin phrase meaning “mode of operation”. Basically, all criminals have a method of operation that encompasses the habits, techniques, and any peculiarities of behavior. The method can stay the same, but it will often grow and change over time as the criminal becomes more skillful at committing a specific crime.
If an investigator or detective establishes the MO in a homicide case, they would refer to the forensic analysis of the crime scene.
Here are a few examples of a criminal’s MO:
The type of restraints used on the victim, wound patterns, and type of fiber of the restraints.
Type of weapon used, such as knife, blunt object, or gun.
Tape found on victim that was used to bind hands and cover mouth.
Tools used to gain entry to victim’s home.
Attack could be from when the victim exits their vehicle or walks through a dark parking garage.
Time of day that the offender chooses to commit the crime, such as nighttime or early morning.
Lack of fingerprints that would indicate the offender used gloves.
Profiling: Signature
A signature refers to the distinctive behaviors that help to serve the criminal’s psychological and emotional needs. Physical evidence helps to establish the signature behaviors of the criminal who committed the specific crime.
Again, the investigator or detective for a homicide case would refer to the forensic analysis for this type of evidence in regard to the signature behaviors at the crime scene.
Here are a few examples of criminal signatures:
Level of injury to the victim, minimal or excessive.
Specific location or sequence to the criminal act.
Ejaculation, urination, and/or defecation at the crime scene.
Specific type of weapon used.
Personal items taken from victim.
Specific type of victim targeted that refers to age, race, occupation, or other physical characteristics.
Anything specifically left at the crime scene, such as a note or object.
Types of Profiling
Homant & Kennedy (1998) - 3 main types:
Crime Scene Profiling – info at crime scene
Offender Profiling – collection of data, aggregate of those involved in particular crimes
Psychological Profiling – personality tests, interviewing etc. to assess which individual fits known personality template
Profiling: Behavior Reflects Personality
In a homicide cases, FBI agents glean insight into personality through questions about the murderer's behavior at four crime phases:
Antecedent: What fantasy or plan, or both, did the murderer have in place before the act? What triggered the murderer to act some days and not others?
Method and manner: What type of victim or victims did the murderer select? What was the method and manner of murder: shooting, stabbing, strangulation or something else?
Body disposal: Did the murder and body disposal take place all at one scene, or multiple scenes?
Post-offense behavior: Is the murderer trying to inject himself into the investigation by reacting to media reports or contacting investigators?
Psychology’s Contributions to Profiling
Psychologists have been conducting their own criminal profiling research, and they've developed several new approaches:
Offender profiling (see following slides)
Crime action profiling (see following slides)
Offender Profiling
Much of this work comes from applied psychologist David Canter, PhD, who founded the field of investigative psychology in the early 1990s.
Investigative psychology, Canter says, includes many areas where psychology can contribute to investigations--including profiling. The goal of investigative psychology's form of profiling, like all profiling, is to infer characteristics of a criminal based on his or her behavior during the crime. But, Canter says, the key is that all of those inferences should come from empirical, peer-reviewed research--not necessarily from investigative experience.
For example, Canter and his colleagues recently analyzed crime scene data from 100 serial homicides to test the FBI's organized/disorganized model. Their results indicate that, in contrast to some earlier findings, almost all serial murderers show some level of organization.
Crime Action Profiling
Forensic psychologist Richard Kocsis, PhD, and his colleagues have developed models based on large studies of serial murderers, rapists and arsonists that act as guides to profiling such crimes. The models, he says, are similar to the structured interviews clinical psychologists use to make clinical diagnoses. They come out of an Australian government-funded research program that Kocsis ran, in which he developed profiling methods in collaboration with police and fire agencies.
Kocsis says crime action profiling models are rooted in knowledge developed by forensic psychologists, psychiatrists and criminologists. Part of crime action profiling also involves examining the process and practice of profiling.
The Psychology-Law Enforcement Relationship
In recent years, the FBI has begun to work closely with many forensic psychologists, in fact, it employs them. Psychologist Stephen Band, PhD, is the chief of the Behavioral Science Unit, and clinical forensic psychologist Anthony Pinizzotto, PhD, is one of the FBI's chief scientists.
The unit also conducts research with forensic psychologists at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
One recent collaborative study, for example, looked at the relationship between burglaries and certain types of sexual offenses--whether specific aspects of a crime scene differed in incidents that began as a burglary and ended in a sexual offense, as opposed to crimes that began as a sexual offense but included theft. Police looking at the first type of crime might want to look for convicted burglars in the area, Pinizzotto explains.
More recently, the unit has also begun to collaborate with forensic psychologists at Marymount University in Arlington, Va.--another indication that law enforcement and psychology will continue to work together.
Racial Profiling
"Racial Profiling" refers to the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual's race, ethnicity, religion or national origin.
Examples of racial profiling are the use of race to determine which drivers to stop for minor traffic violations (commonly referred to as "driving while black or brown"), or the use of race to determine which pedestrians to search for illegal contraband.
Another example of racial profiling is the targeting, ongoing since the September 11th attacks, of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians for detention on minor immigrant violations in the absence of any connection to the attacks on the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.
Instances of Racial Profiling
Asian Racial Profiling
Walking While Black and Brown
Gang Database Racial Profiling
Bicycling While Black and Brown
Bitten While Black and Brown
Shopping While Black and Brown
Workplace Racial Profiling
Discussion: Racial Profiling in Singapore?
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/allegations-of-racial-profiling-during-spot-checks-untrue
