CRI2003 – Psychology & Investigation

Class 2, 17/10/22

 Introduction
- The importance of criminal investigations for police departments has mostly
been investigated through organisational and technical aspects
- This has overshadowed the impact of success of police investigations have on the
criminal justice system
- Unless a crime is solved and a person is arrested and arraigned in Court, the
entire system – prosecutors, defence lawyers, judges, probation services,
prisons, rehabilitation – would fail to come into play
- Detectives comprise approximately 15-20% of law enforcement personnel
- Has a major impact on the public image of the police through its successes or
failures
 Introduction
- The popular conception of a detective discovers puzzling clues, logically analysing
the evidence and brilliantly exposing the culprit
- Real world investigations are less dramatic and probably more chaotic
- Any investigation is based on special information: EVIDENCE
- Difference between information and evidence:
o Information, in terms of knowledge, provides facts about a topic. These
facts vary in terms of relevance, detail and accuracy
o Evidence is the use of information to support a conclusion
 Introduction
- Psychologists are researching the anatomy of criminal investigations
i. The structure of criminal evidence
ii. Police detective work
iii. Investigative failures
- Most investigations are short and follow a simple complex where the offender is
identified by the victim
- More complex investigations involve strategies of collating evidence which is
robust enough to withstand the test in court:
o Proof beyond reasonable doubt
 Evidence
- “Proof beyond reasonable doubt does not mean proof beyond the shadow of a
doubt. The law would fail to protect the community if it admitted fanciful
possibilities to deflect the course of justice. If the evidence is so strong against a
man as to leave only a remote possibility in his favour, which can be dismissed
with the sentence ‘of course it is possible but not in the least probable’ the case
is proved beyond reasonable doubt, but nothing short of that will suffice”.
o Lord Denning
o Miller vs. Minister of Pension – 1974 – 2 ALL Er 372
 Functional phases of investigations

 Functional phases of investigation

A crime is discovered

Police search for and collect

evidence from the crime scene,
which may lead to new
investigative avenues and
additional evidence

All evidence needs to be

evaluated and analysed

Guided by the evidence,

investigators generate suspects,
prioritise them, and then conduct
assessments of the most likely
possibilities

Identifying the offender required

“proof beyond reasonable
doubt”. Such proof is established
through evidence in the form of a
witness, a confession, and/or
physical evidence.

This process of identifying the

offender and establishing guilt
operates in both directions.
Evidence found at the crime
scene (e.g., fingerprints) or from
follow-on investigative efforts
may lead to a suspect;
alternatively, evidence obtained
from investigating a suspect (e.g.,
a confession) may link back to a
crime.
 On evidence
- Information (intelligence and evidence) is required to strategically guide the
collection, prioritisation and evaluation of suspects
- Evidence is a recorded fact relevant to the crime, the origin of which can be
identified (e.g., witness statement, crime scene photography, laboratory report,
etc.)
- Theories, assumptions, and institution are not evidence
- Intelligence is a broader category of information that may not rise to the
standard of evidence or be admissible in court. While criminal intel is often useful
in the early stages of an investigation to help guide police decision-making,
evidence is required to legally solve a crime.
 On evidence
- Evidence has two structural properties that determine its importance in an
investigation:
i. Strength
- The stronger the evidence, the more it corroborates the guilt (or innocence) of a
suspect or supports a particular theory of the crime, in comparison with other
suspects or theories
ii. Reliability
- Reliability is the accuracy or truthfulness of the evidence. Even strong evidence
has little probative value if it is wrong
 On evidence
- In addition to being strong and reliable, the best evidence is independent but
connected through a pattern (corroboration):
- Independent means that it can stand alone and gives a unique contribution to
the investigation:
- E.g., DNA found on a crime scene

 Criminal investigative failures

- Understanding the anatomy of a criminal investigation helps to both focus police
efforts and identify risks of failure
- While evidence flows through all phases of an investigation, it takes on varying
complexions and vulnerabilities at different points
- Problems with evidence at any stage can lead to an investigative failure
- Not all unsolved crimes are investigative failures as the tactical decisions of the
offender also influence the probability of solving a crime. police cannot recover
evidence that does not exist in the first place
- A detective must conduct a thorough investigation while avoiding a number of
potential traps
 Criminal investigative failures
- There are three types of criminal investigative failure:
iii. Ignored crimes
iv. Unsolved crimes that should have been cleared, and
v. Wrongful convictions
- While the second type of crime is the most common, the third is the most
damaging
- All three failures share common causes
 Criminal investigative failures
- In a study by Rossmo & Pollock (2018 -2020) causal factors were identifies for
each failure and grouped into three categories:
i. Personal problems were within the individual control of a detective (e.g.,
rush to judgement, tunnel vision, logical errors)
ii. Organisational issues were within the control of the police agency (e.g.,
lack of resources, groupthink, interagency communication failures)
iii. Situational influences were outside the control of the criminal justice
system (e.g., intense media attention, deceitful witnesses)
 Criminal investigative failures
- The study included murder, rape and sexual assault cases (N=50) most of which
were wrongful convictions
- 363 causal factors were identified
o 61% were personal
o 21% were organisational
o 18% were situational
- Causal factors were classified into 40 categories: the top 8 accounted for half of
all causes
- There is a relationship between some causal factors and some combinations tend
to cluster together
 Criminal investigative failures
- Top eight categories of causal factors of failures in criminal investigations:
i. Confirmation bias,
ii. Tunnel vision,
iii. Intense media attention,
iv. Management/supervision issues,
v. Careless/incompetent investigation,
vi. Improper interrogations,
vii. Rush to judgement,
viii. Improper forensics
 Criminal investigative failures
- Three meta-categories of causal factors of failures in criminal investigations

 Criminal investigative failures

- Particular causal factor combinations tended to cluster together;
- Example:
o High profile crimes often caused a rush to judgement, followed by the
premature shift from an evidence-based to a suspect-based investigation.
These problems then led to tunnel vision and confirmation bias,
ultimately leading to evidence failures.
 Rush to judgements
- Police would want to conclude investigations early due to many reasons
particularly public fear, media attention, organisational stress, desire to
apprehend a dangerous criminal, ego etc.
- Strong evidence emerging early in an investigation can also have the effect of
push investigators to conclude early even if its reliability is untested
- This can lead to shift the investigation from an evidence-based inquiry to a
suspect based investigation
 Rush to judgement
- In an evidence-based investigation, police would gather information to establish
what happened during the crime
- In a suspect based investigation, the police would have identified the offender
and would therefore gather evidence for court proceedings
- Shifting to a suspect based investigation earlier than required could result in loss
of evidence therefore rending prosecution more difficult or even worthless
 Rush to judgement
- Premature judgement may be influences by intuition – a gut feeling or instinct
- We use two types of decision-making processes
i. The rational
ii. The intuitive
- Intuition is automatic, fast, and powerful and often in volves cognitive shortcuts
or heuristics. It is implicit and therefore difficult to control
- Intuition is based on experience and takes time to develop. It exists for our
survival, but it is not necessarily accurate
 Rush to judgement
- Intuition is most useful in stable environments with consistent rules
- Intuition cannot replace rational analysis which may be defined as the logical
manner of sorting out complex tasks such as those in criminal investigations
- Criminal investigations are usually not as smooth as depicted in novels and films
- Most often complex investigations have information overload and high
distractive noise
 Rush to judgement
- The temporal order of evidence discovery is not necessarily in parallel to what
actually happened
- Items are found sporadically, not necessarily through the crime scene, may take
days to process and have results, delays etc.
- Information flow is haphazard and is therefore not conductive to logical
analytical thinking
- Random order of information and time lags can contribute to the risk of thinking
error
 Rush to judgement
- Strong convincing evidence, uncovered early into an investigation, may distort
proper evaluation and subsequently this may be reflected in the quality of the
evidence presented in court
- Technically, the order in which evidence is collected by a detective should not
determine its bearing on the whole view of the investigation
- Research in experimental psychology suggests that people do not sequentially
evaluate evidence but rather integrate it into larger cognitive structures and
narratives
 Rush to judgement
- Research have also shown that evidential reasoning moves forward and
backwards between evidence and conclusions
- This process is hugely affected by a person’s prior beliefs and biases and can
therefore produce subconscious revisions of evidence
- Such reasoning produces undesirable distortions to evidential reasoning which is
not suitable for criminal investigations
 Tunnel vision
- Systematic logical errors in police investigations can lead to unsolved crime or
worst, wrongful conviction
- Like all decision makers, detectives have cognitive biases operating sub-
consciously
- A rush to judgement often leads to tunnel vision and confirmation bias whilst
distorting the interpretation and evaluation of other available avenues to the
investigations and evidence
 Tunnel vision
- Tunnel vision occurs when an investigation is narrowly focused on one or very
limited number of alternatives
- It can result in a police officer becoming totally focused on something which does
not allow clear thinking, and which eliminates other avenues or other suspects
- Tunnel vision has not yet been well defined by psychologists and is rather
liberally used in legal literature to refer to the reluctance to consider alternatives
 Confirmation bias
- Confirmation bias is more operational in nature and therefore received more
attention for proper research and analysis
- It may be defined as selective thinking
- We have a natural tendency to confirm our hypotheses:
i. By looking for supporting information
ii. Minimising inconsistent evidence
iii. Interpreting ambiguous information in a manner to support our theses
 Confirmation bias
- Amongst the most common confirmation biases are:
i. Biased search for evidence
ii. Biased interpretation of information
iii. Biased memory
- These processes include motivated processes like intentionally choosing only
evidence which is consistent with one’s beliefs and cognitive processes like
processing only the information in line with one’s beliefs
- A rush to judgement leading to a tunnel vision are often the catalysts
 Confirmation bias
- Research has shown that confirmation bias supported by faulty assumptions,
probability errors and group think was the main combination of failures in
wrongful convictions
- Detectives suffering from confirmation bias are more likely to interpret evidence
i. In a prejudicial manner
ii. Uncritically accepting what supports their investigative theory
iii. Rejecting what does not fall within their theory
iv. Fail to engage in differential diagnosis by not considering alternative
hypotheses of the crime or different suspects
 Confirmation bias
- Confirmation bias is progressive: the deeper one gets embroiled into one theory,
the more difficult it becomes to critically consider alternatives
- Cognitive biases (or the systematic thought process caused by the tendency of
the human brain to simplify information processing it through a filter of personal
experience and preferences) can distort our interpretation of probability,
producing errors in rationality and logic
- Critical thinking requires effort, and many times organisational politics are
challenging and therefore required shifts to correct confirmation biases do not
happen
 Evidence failures
- There are three types of evidence error that can impede or bias detective
decision-making:
i. Evidence collection – a failure to collect all the relevant evidence
necessary to thoroughly investigate the case – e.g., crime scene evidence,
neighbourhood canvass, interviews
ii. Evidence evaluation – a failure to assess evidence reliability (the
probability an item of evidence – e.g., a confession, a witness statement,
a lab analysis – is accurate or true)
 iii. Evidence analysis – a failure to logically analyse the evidence – e.g.,
strength, reliability implications, connections, patterns
 Evidence failures
- Evidence flows through all phases of a criminal investigation, therefore any
integral evidentiary problems, risk derailing a successful outcome
- These errors often originate from a rush to judgement, followed by tunnel vision,
confirmation bias, and/or groupthink
- Evidence collection problems likely play a more significant role in criminal
investigative failures involving unsolved crimes that should have been solved
- An investigation is a form of historical science (follows a deductive process unlike
other sciences using an inductive process)
 Evidence failures
- Traces of past events are exposed in criminal investigation, i.e., science reason
from cause to effects while investigations reason from effects to causes
- The search for evidence takes on a primary role as traces generated by past
events may exist but remain undiscovered
- Any undiscovered evidence will never be evaluated or analysed and can be lost
by time
- Cold case detectives “face problems of faded memories, missing witnesses,
retired police officers, misplaced evidence, and altered crime scene. Their
criminal investigative expertise must be combined with historical research skils”
(Rossmo, 2017)


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