Chapter 6: Forensic Psychology 🧠⚖️

Investigative Psychology 🕵️‍♂️🧠

• 📊 Combines collecting investigative info, making inferences, and helping police with decisions using scientific research
• 👤 Determines offender characteristics to identify likely suspects
• ⚖️ Behavioral features of crime help in investigation & prosecution

Example

• 🔪 Dead body with knife in right hand, suicidal note
• ✋ Man left-handed, wife said he was stressed 😟, others said happy 😀 → wife became suspect 👩‍🦰

Two Approaches

1. Clinical/Subjective Approach 🧩 – traditional profiling, “think like the criminal” 🕵️‍♂️
2. Empirical & Logical Approach 📊 – research & logic-based, full investigative coverage, from robbery to terrorism ✈️💣

Investigative Psychology Goal

• 📈 Provides empirically supported info on offender behavior consistency & variability
• 🔎 Forensic psychologists act like detectives integrating psychology with criminal investigation

Steps of Criminal Investigation

1. ✅ Determine if a crime occurred
2. 🏛️ Verify jurisdiction & authority
3. 🧪 Collect evidence
4. 💰 Recover stolen property
5. 👤 Identify culprits
6. 🚨 Locate & apprehend culprits
7. 📜 Help prosecution with admissible evidence
8. 🧑‍⚖️ Testify effectively in court

Profiling 📝

• Psychological sketch of unknown criminal to narrow suspects
• Doesn’t identify a specific person, gives general description
• Components: age, sex, race, residence 🏠, intelligence 🧠, occupation 💼, marital status 💍, living arrangements 🏡, psychosexual maturity ❤️, vehicle type 🚗, motivations 🔥, arrest record 📋, provocation factors ⚡, interrogation tips 🗣️

Example – Witch Profile (Kramer & Sprenger 1971) 🧙‍♀️

• 👵 Elderly female, poor 💸, lives on edge of town 🌆, knows herbal medicines 🌿, “Mark of the Devil” 🔥, steals men’s potency 💪

Preventing Terrorism 🛡️

• ✈️💣 Similar sketches used to predict & prevent crimes

Computerized Profiling 💻

• 🛫 Example: USA airline CAPPS system identified 10 of 19 9/11 hijackers
• Factors: one-way tickets 🎫, cash payment 💵, travel alone 👤, persistent patterns 🔄
• Limitations: false positives ❌, travel profile insufficient
• Deeper profiling: dress 👕, nationality 🌍, travel history 🗺️, airport behavior 🛂, books 📚, cultural/social background 🏘️

Hijacking Epidemic (1968–1978) 🛫

• 🇨🇺 1968: 36 hijackings, 20 to Cuba
• 1969: 71 hijackings, 58 to Cuba
• 1970: 69 hijackings
• 1970s hijacker profile: unsuccessful 😞, socially inadequate 😕, unstable jobs 💼, helpless 😔, suicidal ⚰️, desire for control 🎮
• Modern terrorists: socially adequate 👍, married 💍, stable jobs 💼

Criminal Profiling 🔍

• 🎯 Identifies offender or potential targets

Geographic Profiling 🗺️

• Predicts offender’s likely locations: home 🏠, work 🏢, social venues 🎉, travel routes 🚗

Racial Profiling ⚠️

• ✋ Police action based on race/ethnicity instead of behavior
• 🚗✋ Example: “Driving While Black” → stopped due to race
• 🏛️ Stemmed from historical racism

Limits of Profiling ❌

• 🎓 Needs training & experience
• ❓ Cannot identify individual with certainty
• 📊 Yields probability judgments
• 🔄 Old profiles may fail due to changing criminal types
• 👤 Innocent people may be suspected
• ⚠️ Examples: profile said 20-year-old black, actual offender 40-year-old white
• 👤⚡ Two major limits: individual differences, unpredictability

Key Milestones, Figures, and Researches