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Investigative Psychology – Applications
Improve Investigative Process and Detection Rates
- Suspect identification and prioritisation (“Offender Profiling”, Canter profiling equations and geographical offender profiling)
- Comparative case analysis (linking); Identification TICs (additional offences)
- Offence focusing: identification of salient features of crime to direct investigative effort
- Offending prediction: an offender’s likely development (where, when, what)
- Criminal history matching
- Police investigative decision-making: approaches to improvement
- Criminal network analysis: identify key-role offenders
Improve Investigative Interviewing
- Psychological approaches to interviewing of suspects and witnesses
- Psychological evaluations of evidence: assess credibility and validity of testimony with a view to false allegations and false confessions
- Detection of deception and lying: identification of false crime reports
- Psychological assessments of interviewees, including vulnerable persons
The Legal Case
- Psychological evaluation of testimony: detect weaknesses in eyewitness evidence
- Defendant profiling: assessments of offence activity and likelihood perpetrated by defendant
- Authorship attribution through Forensic Psycholinguistics
- False rape allegations
- Psychological autopsy
- Entrapment: assessments of appropriateness of police investigative activity
- Jury assessment
Risk/Threat Assessment and Reduction
- Predict risk, particularly in relation to violent offending (including domestic violence, stalking, extortion) using scientific tools and software to improve investigative decision making
- Probity profiling (in corporate context where candidates are considered for senior positions)
- Insurance fraud-related investigations: diversion/reduction, identification
- Investigations into terrorist networks, terrorist radicalization processes, development of suicide bombers
