Common Errors of Law Enforcement - Assignment Example

Law Enforcement Spring, Question Describe the common errors and psychological pitfalls that may affect a criminal investigation. Provide specific examples. Criminal investigation is a vast field that involves a number of steps in order to solve a case, which are ‘crime detection’, ‘locating and identifying suspects’, ‘locating, recording and processing evidence’, ‘arresting the perpetrator(s)’, ‘recovering property pursuant to the Fourth Amendment requirements, ‘preparing for trial’ and ‘convicting the defendant (Becker & Dutelle, 2013, pp. 17-18). While conducting a criminal investigation, the law enforcement officers such as the investigators, patrol officers, preliminary investigation team, follow-up investigation team, all can make several common mistakes or psychological pitfalls can be there that can result in erroneous criminal investigation. These common error and psychological pitfalls must be known beforehand in order to avoid them while conducting an investigation. After crime detection, the preliminary investigating officer has to conduct a thorough preliminary investigation. In order to investigate, he has to try to locate and identity the perpetrator of the crime. This location and identification requires interviewing of eyewitnesses in order to obtain information from them (Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence, & United States of America, 1999). The first and foremost common error that an investigating officer can make is asking an eyewitness leading questions that can make him or her inform what he/she has not witnessed. The investigating officer should ask open-ended questions from the eyewitnesses and keep them separated if they are more than one, as one’s account can affect the other’s account. Witnesses should be instructed to “avoid discussing details of the accident with other potential witnesses” (Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence, & United States of America, 1999, p. 16). The investigators should allow the eyewitnesses to explain the happening as elaborative as they can and in the description phase, the investigators as interviewers should not interrupt the interviewees or try to redirect them (Day & Marion, 2012). In addition to that, the investigators make another mistake while investigating eyewitnesses. They give unintentional signals with their body language, speaking tone, facial gestures, and other cues to the eyewitnesses that can influence the validity of the eyewitness evidence (Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence, & United States of America, 1999). Day and Marion (2012) inform that any ‘fidgety behavior’ depicted by investigating officer can cause “fidgety movements in an interview” (p. 255). People tend to synchronize their body movements during discussion. These fidgety movements of the interviewee can be understood by the investigating officer as something doubtful or as a cue of deception. In reality, people who lie while giving an interview try to make fewer movements than others do, so this action cannot be regarded as suspicious. If the investigating officer is biased about the suspect’s guilt or has a preconceived idea about his guilt, the interview can lead to confession by the interviewee. Interviewer’s expectations influence the interviewee behavior as “the pitfalls of self-fulfilling prophecies, that is, the way in which a person’s expectations can influence his or her own and others’ behaviors in a way that will confirm the person’s beliefs” (Day & Marion, 2012, p. 255). The interviews that are conducted improperly can result in wrong accusation on suspects. The interrogating officers can have false confessions because of “the use of providing false incriminating evidence and the use of minimization” when they try to investigate a suspect (Day & Marion, 2012, p. 256). For example, a nineteen years old teenager confessed about murdering his girlfriend in California when the interrogating officers informed him falsely during a lie detector test that he was observed near the crime location, and finding of his fingerprints. He was not the murderer, but he confessed wrongly because of false incriminating evidence (Day & Marion, 2012). The investigators sometimes depict a ‘tunnel vision’ that means that investigators have logical fallacy due to which, they “focus on a suspect, select and filter the evidence that will ‘build a case’ for conviction, while ignoring or suppressing evidence that points away from guilt” (Findley & Scott, 2006, p. 292). This procedure is quite misleading as every law enforcement official uses the same lens that has given a conclusion about a case, and if there is some evidence that appears conflicting with the conclusion, that will be “overlooked or dismissed as irrelevant, incredible, or unreliable” (Findley & Scott, 2006, p. 292). Human perception and situation along with cultural and institutional demands construct a tunnel vision. There are many wrongful convictions based on wrong eyewitness identification. With wrong or mistaken eyewitness recognition of a suspect, the investigating officers will interpret an innocent person’s responses as suspicious. With the interrogation process, the investigators can also get a wrong confession (Findley & Scott, 2006). With tunnel vision, the investigating officers target only one suspect ignoring all others who should be investigated. With tunnel vision, one suspect is focused and the investigation usually ends in disaster (Rossmo, 2005). Therefore, tunnel vision can be regarded as a common error that can lead to wrongful conviction and wrong solution to criminal investigation. Such investigations result in failure. According to Governor George Ryan, a total of thirteen cases in Illinois got proved wrong because of tunnel vision (Findley & Scott, 2006). Examples of cases with tunnel vision are Boucher v .The Queen, [1955] S.C.R. 16, R. v. Thomas (R.T.), 2010 MBCA 91 and R. v. Sinclair. [2010] S.C.J. No. 35 2010 SCC 35. Mistaken or wrong identification of criminal can be divided into two parts; one is identification of the wrong person as an offender and second is unsuccessful identification of the right offender. In the first case, an innocent person is suspected as a criminal while in the second case, a criminal goes unidentified that can be risky for crime prevention. In a line up, the law enforcement officials have already identified a suspect of the crime, and they can be suggestive to the eyewitness (Levine & Tapp, 1973). The eyewitnesses and investigators should be aware about perception and limitations of memory. The investigator should allow the witness to recollect what he has witnessed. The eyewitness should be observant, interpretive, and communicative and must remember everything about the happening in order to inform the police about it. There are many chances of errors or psychological pitfalls in collecting information from eyewitnesses as every person has his own view of observing and understanding a happening (Rossmo, 2005). There are certain cases that can be observed as mistaken or wrong identification by witnesses. These are R v Alexander (1981) 145 CLR 395, R v Turnbull (1977) 1 QB 224, R v Pitkin (1995) 80 A Crim R 302 and R v Currie (unreported) C.C.A. No. 313 of 1990 Qld Court of Criminal Appeal, and many more can be given where wrong identification of criminals was there. The investigating officers can have cognitive biases that can conclude in ‘distorted judgments and faulty analyses’ (Rossmo, 2005). If the investigating officer has developed a wrong influence from the preliminary stage of investigation, starting will be distorted due to which, the conclusion can be jeopardized. Therefore, investigating officers can be biased in their understanding of a suspect as a criminal. Investigating officers can be biased in evaluation of evidence. The physical evidence obtained at a crime scene can be misinterpreted based on the theory of the investigator (Rossmo, 2005). The investigator errs when he tries to find or search for some evidence that matches his theory by neglecting any other kind of evidence that proves his theory wrong. The evidence that confirms the theory is given much significance and contradictory evidence is suppressed. With this confirmation bias, importance evidence can be ignored that is essential in reality for successful investigation. With confirmation bias, the investigation will be erroneous and flawed and result in wrong conviction (Rossmo, 2005). Law enforcement officers also commit probability errors. In terms of crime investigation, patterns cannot be looked for or inferences cannot be drawn from some happenings only. Coincidences can be there and they must not be considered as similar or alike patterns (Rossmo, 2005). Connections between two offences are there when the investigators try to sort out the cases in backward direction. There can be errors of coincidence, but innocent people should not be convicted on the bases of coincidence only. One incidence can be related to other or can be understand like the other, but every criminal occurrence should be dealt separately as coincidences or similarities will only bring distortion in findings and investigation and nothing else. When two occurrences are overlapped and there is higher probability, there are chances of conjunction fallacy (Rossmo, 2005). Rossmo (2005) describes two kinds of thinking errors that are prosecutor’s fallacy and defense attorney’s fallacy. Prosecutor’s fallacy is there “when the probability of the evidence given guilt is equated to the probability of guilt given the evidence” (Rossmo, 2005, p. 12). Defense attorney’s fallacy is there when evidence is not regarded in totality, but in seclusion. The investigators can also err because of being under work pressure. If they are working on a case of more importance, they tend to neglect other cases of less importance. The organizational and psychological pressures can lead to distorted investigation of a certain case (Rossmo, 2005). In investigating crimes, the officers should take care of red herrings or rumors, as they can spoil the investigative effort towards solution of a case. The investigators should check their knowledgebase. Anything that is based on rumors must be separated from collected evidence and other details. Witness misinformation, rumors and red herrings can mislead an investigation. Rumors and red herrings can be mischievous acts resulting in failure of an investigation (Rossmo, 2005). The investigating officers should be knowledgeable about social and psychological theories of crime, as they can be supported to carry on their investigation quite successfully. In addition, they must take care of common errors and psychological pitfalls that can be there in a criminal investigation, as these can lead to failure in investigation. The eyewitnesses that are interviewed should be investigated separately and if there are more than one witness, the investigating officer should make sure that they do not interact with each other because the observed happenings can change. The eyewitnesses can wrongly identify innocent people if the investigating officers appear suggestive. Additionally, wrongly conducted interviews can result in wrong confessions and convictions. The officers should not keep biases about suspects, as this hinders successful investigation. Any rumors or misinformation must be checked and should not be allowed to misdirect the investigator. References Becker, Ronald F. & Dutelle, Aric W. (2013). Criminal Investigation. Jones & Bartlett Publishers. Boucher v .The Queen, [1955] S.C.R. 16. Day, D. M., & Marion, S. M. (2012). “Applying social psychology to the criminal justice system”. In Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. 2nd Ed. Sage Publications. pp. 245-272. Findley, K. A., & Scott, M. S. (2006). The multiple dimensions of tunnel vision in criminal cases. Wisconsin Law Review, 2, pp. 291-397. Levine, F. J., & Tapp, J. L. (1973). The psychology of criminal identification: The gap from Wade to Kirby. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 1079-1131. R v Alexander (1981) 145 CLR 395 R v Currie (unreported) C.C.A. No. 313 of 1990 Qld Court of Criminal Appeal R v Pitkin (1995) 80 A Crim R 302 R v Turnbull (1977) 1 QB 224 R. v. Sinclair. [2010] S.C.J. No. 35 2010 SCC 35. R. v. Thomas (R.T.), 2010 MBCA 91 Rossmo, D. K. (2005). Criminal investigative failures. CRC Press. Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence, & United States of America. (1999). Eyewitness Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcement. Read More