Forensic Psychology For Dummies (62 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Combinations of features can change each other’s implications. For example, setting fire to a building after it has been burgled suggests a different inference (such as the fire being set to destroy evidence) from setting fire to a building that has symbolic significance, such as a school.
Hearing the stories people tell themselves: Criminal narratives
One interesting way of understanding what criminals are doing that investigative psychologists have been developing is to think of the personal stories criminals tell themselves about their lives. These narratives can be used as a basis for inferences as well as assisting in guiding interview strategies.
The following four criminal narratives have been suggested as being prevalent in the minds of different criminals:
Offender sees crime as an exciting escapade in which he overcomes adversity to win the rewards that are due to the victor.
The mission may be avenging insult to his honour or even fighting for the honour of his family or others. Whatever the precise nature, he casts himself in the role of justified hero.
This offender feels that he’s always the fall guy and that his crime was just him trying to cope, but it all went wrong. He doesn’t see himself as a criminal at all, but as misunderstood and picked-on.
Some criminals that I talk to, usually older ones, say that crime is just what they do: it may even have lost some of its excitement for them. But they’re proud of committing their crimes effectively, for instance, doing a bank robbery without anyone getting hurt.
Narrative not motive
Criminal narratives are rather different from the idea of ‘motive’, which is so enjoyed by fiction writers. In fact, courts don’t need to know the motive for a crime. The judge and jury just need to know that the crime was committed by the defendant and he knew what he was doing and its implications. The term ‘motive’ is such a slippery one that I avoid using it throughout this book. It can mean an explanation, a purpose, a reason, an unconscious urge, the set of actions it was part of (such as ‘we were all drunk and having a laugh’) and some form of narrative (as in ‘I don’t let people push me around’). The term’s ambiguity also makes it very difficult to determine.
The classic motives in thrillers such as revenge, jealousy or greed, never go the whole way in explaining why the particular crime was the way of achieving that motive. Furthermore, in real life often more than one such explanation exists and the criminal himself may not be fully aware of why he committed the crime.
Locating offenders geographically
One of the most useful pieces of information that detectives can get is the geographical location where the culprit may be found. This information allows the prioritisation of suspects by putting them in order of how near they are to that location. It allows the linking of crimes to a common offender and also enables the police to put up surveillance in designated locations or to carry out careful house-to-house inquiries in a targeted area. When they need to do a trawl of possible suspects by using DNA matches, an indication of the area in which the offender may have lived at the time of the offence can help to limit the number of people whose DNA needs to be matched. For all these reasons investigative psychologists consider
where
a crime occurs as well as what happens in the crime. They can use this to make inferences about the criminal and where he may be based.
I did an elementary form of geographical ‘offender profiling’ when I proposed that John Duffy had lived in the area circumscribed by the first three crimes of the series (see the earlier section ‘The railway murderer’). However, since that time computer programmes have been developed to indicate the likelihood of an offender living in any particular location.