Forensics Flashcards
(49 cards)
How is crime time relative?
Attitudes, social norms and moral values change over time. Homosexuality - illegal before 1967 in the UK.
How is crime culturally relative?
Attitudes differ across cultures; what’s deemed legal and illegal will vary. In Saudi Arabia - marriage has no minimum legal age. In the UK, one must be 16 or older with PC.
How is crime age relative?
A crime is an act committed with intention despite full awareness of the law. Children below 10 are considered to not be fully responsible for their actions - they cannot be charged with a crime.
What are the three issues with defining crime?
Crime is time, age and culturally relative.
What are the three ways of measuring crime?
Official statistics, victim and offender surveys.
Give some facts about official statistics as a way of measuring crime.
- Created by official bodies (police, cs)
- Used in E and W since 1805 - time trends
What are problems with official statistics?
- Not accurate; only crimes that have been reported to and recorded by police are included. The dark figure of crime is neglected.
- Misleading; Farrington and Dowds compared crime stats in Nottingham and 2 neighbouring counties; crime rates were higher in Nottingham only because the police recorded all crimes.
- Potential misuse by groups for disinformation through ‘cherry picking’.
Give some facts about offender surveys as a way of measuring crime.
- Ask people to report their own crimes.
- Measure victimless crimes and allow people who’d normally not be caught to record their crimes.
- OCJS is an example.
What are problems with offender surveys?
- People may lie or exaggerate their behaviour.
- Reports may be misleading or falsely interpreted.
- Likely biased, only certain people that’ve committed certain crimes will confess their acts.
Give some facts about victim surveys as a way of measuring crime.
- Collected from victims.
- CS E and W is an example.
- Useful because they include crimes that haven’t been written up by police.
What are the problems with victim surveys?
- Rely on people’s memories which are likely to be faulty or biased. ‘Telescoping’ is an example of faulty memory; people remember events as being more recent or remote than they actually were.
- Don’t consider more impersonal crimes such as white-collar crimes e.g embezzlement.
Outline the key features of the top-down approach.
- Based on interviews of 36 convicted SKs and SMs.
- Organised: sc, intellig, lived together, planned attacks.
- Disorganised: sic, unintellig, lived alone, didn’t plan.
- Data is assimilated about the crime scene and victim, then the crime is classified and judgements are made about the likely charcs. of the offender.
Outline the key features of the bottom-up approach.
- Developed by Canter, uses investigative psych. more.
- Geographical profiling sees the crime scene as an info source, and every case is treated as unique.
- Likely charcs. of the offender are then inferred.
What are the four stages of building an FBI-style profile?
- Assimilating data
- Identify the type of crime committed
- Reconstructing the crime
- Creating a profile
What are the 5 charcs. that should be included in a profile according to Canter?
- Personal charcs.
- Criminal history
- Residential location - ‘circle theory’.
- Domestic and social charcs.
- Occupational and educational history
What are some problems with offender profiling?
- Can only be used for a select range of of offences that reveal more than usual info about the offender such as rape, murder and crimes involving macabre practices.
- Limited effectiveness: Holmes reported that in 192 cases in which profiling was used, 88 arrests were made, but profiling was instrumental in 17% of these arrests.
- Copson found only 14% of senior police officers had found profiling crucial in solving a case.
What was an infamous misuse of offender profiling?
The Rachel Nickell case. She was murdered in 1992. Paul Britton broadcast his suggested profile on TV and several callers identified Colin Stagg. Stagg was innocent, Robert Napper admitted the crime in 2008.
What was a successful use of offender profiling?
John Duffy had committed 24 sexual assaults and three murders. Canter developed a profile that almost completely matched Duffy’s characteristics. For example, he guessed correctly that Duffy had an interest in martial arts - Duffy was a club member.
What are the two biological explanations of offending behaviour?
- Lombroso’s atavistic form
- Genetic and neural factors
Outline the key features of the Atavistic form theory.
- Lombroso studied the physical characteristics of criminals and concluded that criminals were more likely to have primitive features like a heavy brow and strong jaw
- He suggested that criminal behaviour came from primitive instincts that had survived the evolutionary process; criminals were genetic throwbacks that could be identified by their physical features
What are two key weaknesses of Lombroso’s theory of the atavistic form?
- No control group was used to see whether the physical characteristics described were unique to the criminal population
- Much of his sample may have had psychological disorders or chromosomal abnormalities that could’ve been a factor in their criminal behaviour
What does the genetic explanation of offending behaviour revolve around?
- Mednick et al’s concordance analysis supported a genetic link for criminality
- Research into candidate genes found that certain genetic mutations could increase an individual’s susceptibility to engaging in offending behaviour. Brunner et al found an association between an MAOA gene mutation and impulsive aggression.
- However, conc. rates are not 100%, so the env. must play a major role too.
Describe a study investigating neural explanations for criminality.
- Raine et al
- Functional processes of 41 murderers and 41 control participants were examined using PET scans
- The murderers showed signs of dysfunctional processes e.g reduced glucose metabolism in the PFC
Describe Keysers et al’s study into mirror neurons.
- Found that criminals with APD can experience empathy, but only if asked to
- When asked to, they exhibited the empathy reaction and their mirror neurons were activated; implying they may have a ‘neural switch’ that they can turn on and off
