Investigative Psychology Program Transcript

Investigative Psychology Investigative Psychology Program Transcript [MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: In this video program Dr. Gabrielle Salfati explains investigative psychology. She describes how an investigative psychologist studies, analyzes, and assists, in solving crime. She also explains how experts in other areas of psychology and law, help locate evidence and assist in the apprehension and conviction of criminals. DR. GABRIELLE SALFATI: Investigative psychology is really about how psychology can contribute to criminal investigations across the board. One component would be, how do we retrieve information from the crime scene? How do we retrieve information from witnesses and victims, and also offenders? Another component of investigative psychology is how the police make decisions based on that information. The third component of investigative psychology, is what is more commonly known as offender profiling, or crime scene analysis. Offender profiling allows the police to prioritize suspects in order to find the most likely offender that they want to concentrate on for the next stage of the investigation, which is normally the interviewing stage. And the idea is that you want to be able to narrow down this group of suspects in order to find the most likely suspects. Let me give you an example. At any crime scene, you have an enormous amount of information that the police deals with and collects. Traditionally, what we're focused on most, is the forensic side of the crime scene. So this is blood, DNA, hair, footprints, anything that is biological that can be tested in a lab using chemistry techniques. And normally, nowadays, we're really looking at DNA. Now the thing that all of those things have in common, is one, DNA is the most likely thing that's going to get someone convicted, because it is such a reliable tool. But he can also not be present at the crime scene, or is can have been compromised in some way. If it was collected in the wrong way, then it will be compromised, and you can't use it. And some crime scenes just don't have forensic evidence. But what every single crime scene has, and I'm going to use homicide as an example. But every single crime scene has behavioral evidence. What I mean by behavioral evidence, is if the offender picks a particular type of victim, then we have that particular type of victim, for example, a female. If the victim was stabbed, then we have knife wounds. If the victim was sexually assaulted, we have that information. Even if the offender will kill a victim and then remove them from the original crime scene, just like they've done with the forensic evidence, we will know that the offender has removed the victim from the original crime © 2016-2021 Walden University, LLC 1 Investigative Psychology scene. Even an offender who removes forensic evidence tells us something about who that offender is. All of this is part of the behavioral analysis of the crime scene. Now this method became very, very popular in the 1970s and 1980s, originally, when the FBI highlighted that they wanted to try to understand serial sexual murderers. And they did a number of interviews on the topics. And after that, it became a very popular technique. It became the new in technique in the field. And a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon and wanted to be involved, and provide offender profiles, based on crime scene analysis. Very early on in the field, most of the people who were involved with this, were either investigators, very well-trained investigators with an extensive experience behind them, or clinicians, or practitioners who had been involved on a day to day basis with offenders. So they had an understanding of criminal behavior, because they had interviewed them, they had worked in prisons, they had worked in hospitals, and so on. As the technique grew in popularity during the 1980s, some people wanted to bring it into court as evidence. People started asking the question, how valid and reliable is offender profiling? And in the early 1990s, almost as a response to the call of what was going on in the field, the field of investigative psychology was created in the UK. And the premise of this field, and really the focus, was to try to employ scientific methods to try to evaluate profiling as a method, and also trying to advance it as a science. And there was one study, actually, it was very interesting. And they really highlighted the problem that profiling had in the very early years. And that was a study by Alison and his colleagues, that actually looked at real profiles that had been written by people who claim that they were experts. In these profiles, what they essentially were, was a description of who the offender was, based on the crime scene evidence that the profiler had worked with. So this is the crime file, the photograph, sometimes the autopsy report, etc, so a normal police crime file. And based on this, they wrote a report. And in that report, they came up with a pen picture of who the offender was. Across the number of reports that they analyzed in the study, in total they found 4,000 claims across all of them, about who the offender was. So this is something that could be used to identify the offender. What they also found, was that over 80% of that information was unsubstantiated. What that means, is that the profiler would say things like, this may be the offender, this may not be. They could be young. They could be old. It is likely that they may be, there is evidence that, but there were no numbers attached. So if an investigator had to come and use that report, they couldn't really say to which likelihood they could rely on this information. So it didn't say, it's 50% likely © 2016-2021 Walden University, LLC 2 Investigative Psychology that the offender was a male. It is 70% likely that the offender lives within one mile of the crime scene. None of this information was present. So what that study really highlighted, was that the way the information was presented, was presented in a way that people could read it whichever way they wanted. Because they could say well, they could be white, they could not be. If they thought they were, then they could use that profile. And then they would find it useful. And then you would think that that profile would actually help them in their investigations. But what it really highlighted, is was what we need is the numbers. Because how can we possibly present it in court as evidence, or even use it in an investigation, unless we know exactly what components of the crime are the most important to focus on? So let's say you have two pieces of evidence in there. The offender is likely to be male. And the offender lives within one mile of the crime scene. If it is more likely that the offender lives within one mile of the crime scene because there's 85% likelihood, then you should focus on that one, rather than the other component. And that should be your first step in using the profile to identify the most likely offender, to reduce the suspect pool. That's essentially what profiling is supposed to be doing. But what is important to know, is that the reason why none of those numbers were there, is because the research wasn't there. Nobody had done the research to say, well, how far do offenders travel? How likely is it that they have a criminal background? If they do have a criminal background, what would it be, for this specific crime that you're looking at? The research simply wasn't there. And that's why investigate psychology was created, was really to provide the research that could be used to see whether there is an association between the crime scene and who the offender is. Another thing that is at the forefront in offender profiling, is not just trying to identify who the offender is, but is also looking at if an offender commits several crimes, ie, if you have a serial offender, and that could be any kind of offender. It could be what we know as a serial homicide offender, a serial rapist, or more likely, the large volume crimes, a serial burglar, for example. But one of the things that you need to assess, is when you have a number of crimes in a community, how can we determine if these were committed by the same offender? What is it that ties these different crimes together? And the idea here is that we're trying to look for the psychological pattern that carries over from one crime to another. And that pattern might not be, what Sherlock Holmes would call the clue, or the specific individual behavior that might stay the same. It might actually be what is behind the behavior. And I'll give you an example. So what we're really trying to understand, is the psychological meaning of behavior. So let's say that you had, one example that I was use in class, is let's © 2016-2021 Walden University, LLC 3 Investigative Psychology imagine that you had 10 rapes. And all of these rapes, what they have in common, that single behavior that they have in common, is that the victim was gagged. Now if you're an investigator and you're focusing on the specific behavior, you would say that these 10 crimes were linked.

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