M4_A1
Module 4 Overview
Offenders engage in many activities to avoid detection—the more sophisticated the offenders, the more sophisticated their behavior. One of the issues you will examine here is psychogeography—the propensity of a criminal to repeatedly commit crimes in the geographical area close to and around his or her dwelling. The farther away the offenders are from their homes, the less likely they are to commit a crime. We are all much more comfortable functioning in familiar territory and so are criminals. The criminal activity may be restricted or guided by a main road, a canal, or habitation density. Yet, most criminals are highly unlikely to commit a crime within half a mile of their home—it is easier to get caught if one engages in criminal activity too close to home. For example, rapists are much more likely to travel farther away from their home, especially if they have a car, in search of a potential victim. Global positioning systems and sophisticated computer programs greatly help in pinpointing the location of various crimes and triangulating possible locations of the perpetrator.
In interviewing suspects, it is vitally important to have as much information or data about the crime in question as possible. It is imperative to do one's best to separate crucial information from all the data that is received. The investigator may have just a few leads or hundreds of leads that are based on anonymous phone calls if the crime was featured on the local news or other programs such as America's Most Wanted. A plan must be drawn to explore these leads. Multiple leads lead to an increased number of people who will need to be interviewed, be they witnesses or possible suspects.
Imagine a murder that happened in a restroom at a crowded beach or stadium. Think how many individuals may need to be interviewed and how the area must be cordoned off to preserve any potential evidence. Consider interviewing witnesses and looking for a suspect among them. What are some of the inconsistencies you would be looking for as you listen to their stories? How do you know if the person confessing to the crime is actually the perpetrator? These and others issues will be addressed in this module.
In the assignments for this module, you will describe the sources of error in a police investigation and the factors that could lead to false confessions. For the second assignment, you will choose a case and evaluate the role of criminal profiling in assisting with an investigation. You will also evaluate criminal spatial behavior in the third, nongraded assignment.
Compare the difference between how law enforcement personnel and forensic mental health professionals would conduct assessment and criminal investigative procedures.
Identify pertinent ethical standards in various scenarios involving criminal profiling and criminal investigation.
Describe appropriate psychological tests that can be useful in psychological profiling and/or criminal investigation.
Explain how an offender's cognitive functioning, diagnosis, and environmental factors might contribute to the offender's criminal offense behaviors.
PLEASE READ!!!!
The Religious Killer
Ethical Dilemmas; Psychotherapy
A forensic psychologist, specializing in evaluation of criminal defendants, has a part-time private practice in which he conducts psychotherapy with adult patients. He primarily treats individuals suffering from depression and anxiety.
Review the scenario that follows and answer the related questions.
The psychologist receives a phone call from the local police late one night indicating that one of his patients is arrested and charged with her husband’s murder. The female suspect is very distraught and has to be hospitalized for treatment of suicidal ideation.
Several weeks later, a defense attorney contacts the psychologist and gives him a form signed by the woman, who is now a defendant accused of first-degree murder. The form indicates that the psychologist may disclose any information to the woman’s attorney. The lawyer, finding out that the therapist is a forensic psychologist, asks him to conduct an evaluation of legal sanity (state of mind at the time of the offense). “Look,” the lawyer says, “you know her well and you will be able to see things most others do not,” adding, “I would want you to testify as an expert witness in the case.”
The forensic psychologist agrees to conduct the evaluation.
Q1: Is the psychologist right in agreeing to the lawyer’s requests? Why or why not?
The psychologist is not right. Prior to the beginning of psychotherapy, the patient is informed of limits of confidentiality and asked to give an informed consent to treatment. As a psychotherapist, the psychologist is an advocate for his patient, providing emotional support and appropriate treatment. Most information gathered from a patient (except for child abuse) is confidential. As a forensic evaluator, the psychologist is objective and neutral—his responsibility is to conduct an evaluation to address specific psycholegal issues, not provide psychotherapeutic support to the person being evaluated.
Conducting any type of forensic evaluation on a former patient is unethical. The psychologist cannot be suddenly objective and neutral with a patient who trusted him with the most intimate and painful information. He cannot “switch hats” from being an advocate to being a neutral evaluator.
Offender Behavior and Characteristics
Two theoretical rules underlying offender profiling are the consistency and homology of offender behavior (Alison, Bennell, Mokros, & Ormerod, 2002). The consistency tenant posits that the variation in behavior of an offender across his or her own criminal path must be less than the variation in behavior between him or her and other offenders. The homology tenant states that people who commit crimes in a similar pattern will share similar background characteristics and personality traits. Unfortunately, research has not supported the legitimacy of these tenants and this fact may be one of the reasons why criminal profiling is thought to lack the validity and reliability typically required in the psychological community.
Three terms often discussed both in criminal justice circles and on the popular television criminal dramas are modus operandi (MO), rituals, and criminal signatures. Hazelwood and Warren (2003) discussed the modus operandi:
Within the context of criminal investigative analyses, the term modus operandi is used to encapsulate all of the behaviors that are requisite to a particular offender successfully perpetrating a crime. As such, it encompasses all behaviors initiated by the offender to procure a victim and complete the criminal acts without being identified or apprehended. The MO can be quite simple or very complex, with the various degrees of sophistication reflecting the experience, motivation, and intelligence of the offender. (p. 308)
The second term—ritual or ritualistic nature of the crime—is best understood in the context of a sexual offense:
The ritualistic aspects of a sexual crime emanate from the internal psychology of a particular offender as opposed to the situational demands of committing a crime. These behaviors are derived from the motivation for the crime and the sexual fantasy that expresses it. They are symbolic, as opposed to functional; as such, they are highly individualized and reflect the aspects of the crime scene that are unnecessary to the accomplishment of the crime but are pivotal in expressing the primary motivation or purpose of the criminal act itself. (Hazelwood & Warren, 2003, p. 309)
Finally, criminal signature is described by Hazelwood and Warren (2003) as:
In the current context, this term is used to describe a unique combination of behaviors that emerges across two or more offenses. It is a pattern that may include aspects of both the MO and the ritual. Recognition of this unique signature aspect of a crime can occur when crime analysts and/or investigators are attempting to link two or more crimes that have occurred in either close physical or temporal proximity or at times or locations that are highly divergent. (p. 311)
Please read modus operandi, ritual, and signature in serial sexual crime to view a case example of these terms.
References:
Alison, L., Bennell, C., Mokros, A., & Ormerod, D. (2002). The personality
paradox in offender profiling: A theoretical review of the processes
involved in deriving background characteristics from crime scene
actions. Psychology, Public Policy and Law, 8(1), 115–135. Retrieved
from http://www.academia.edu/1101296/The_Personality_Paradox_in_
Offender_Profiling
Hazelwood, R. R., & Warren, J. I. (2003). Linkage analysis: Modus operandi,
ritual, and signature in serial sexual crime. Aggression and Violent
Behavior, 8(6), 307–318. doi:10.1016/S1359-1789(02)00106-4
Geographic Profiling
Psychogeography or geographic profiling (Rossmo & Rombouts, 2008) is an investigative methodology that comes under the umbrella of environmental criminology. Geographic profiling involves extrapolating the probable location of the offender from the locations of his or her crimes. Although it is generally applied in serial murder, rape, arson, robbery, and bombing cases, geographic profiling also can be used in single crimes that involve multiple scenes or other significant geographic characteristics. The location of the crime scenes can provide insight into the offenders' familiarity with the location as well as the level of planning involved with the particular crime.
To learn more about geographic profiling, refer to the Webliography.
Reference:
Rossmo, D. K., & Rombouts, S. (2008). In R. Wortley and L. Mazerolle
(Eds.), Environmental criminology and crime analysis (Vol. 8,
pp. 136–149). New York, NY: Routledge.
Interviewing and Deception
The television series Lie to Me focuses on the detection of deception through body language and facial cues or microexpressions. Many people believe that an individual may have a "tell" or some particular cue that he or she is lying. One commonly believed "tell" is that an individual will look away when he or she is telling a lie. Unfortunately, the more than 20 published studies on this topic appear to indicate that a diverted gaze is not a reliable judge of an individual lying or telling the truth. Research indicates that:
There is no such thing as a Pinocchio response; that is, there is no one indicator of lying. If there were a Pinocchio response, we would have figured that out by now and almost everyone would be able to unerringly detect when people are lying to them, which would be the end to most competitive card games and generally destructive to society. If we could always tell when others were lying, we could no longer be polite, and society would not function, and most and relationships would be in chaos. (Matsumoto, Hwang, Skinner, & Frank, 2011, p. 3)
Training in evaluating microexpressions and other potential signs of lying is not completely worthless. There is some hope that training in the subtleties of human emotions and expression "can make the investigator faster (and thus more efficient) and more accurate in conducting the interviews" (Matsumoto et al., 2011, p. 7).
Reference:
Matsumoto, D., Hwang, H. S., Skinner, L., & Frank, M. (2011, June). Evaluating
truthfulness and Deception: New tools to aid investigators. FBI Law
Enforcement Bulletin, (June): 1–9. Retrieved from http://davidmatsumoto.
com/content/Evaluating%20Truthfulness%20and%20Detecting
%20Deception.pdf
Conclusion
In this module, you focused on learning about patterns of offender behavior that lead to a modus operandi, ritual, or criminal signature and how these elements can help in the criminal profiling process. You have also learned about geographic profiling and how it can help narrow down a search for an offender. Finally, you focused upon the research on detecting deception in the interviewing process and how the science of behavioral lie detection is still in its infancy.
