Police Investigations & Cognitive Bias

• Policing is a new research area focused on when to use weapons and encompasses many varied tasks.
• Police must have diverse skills, initiative, leadership, empathy, interpersonal skills, and the ability to handle stress.

Desirable Characteristics for Police

• Intelligence: Assessed via minimum qualifications and cognitive ability exams.
• Health and Fitness: Evaluated through fitness tests, medical exams, and drug tests.
• Personality: Assessed using entrance exams, personality tests, and interviews.
• Ethics: Determined through background checks and polygraph tests.
• Recommendations: Letters of recommendation are used.
• Predictive validity of these tests in forecasting job performance requires a careful definition of "success".

Cognitive Bias

• Cognitive bias is when preexisting beliefs, expectations, motives, or situational context influence the collection, perception, or interpretation of new information.
• What is already known or expected affects how new information is perceived and evaluated.
• Most impactful in ambiguous situations because these situations are very often faced by police.
• Cognitive biases are not inherently bad, but over-reliance can be problematic.

Types of Cognitive Bias

• Confirmation Bias: Seeking evidence that confirms existing beliefs and ignoring contradictory information.
• Contextual Bias: Irrelevant information influences judgments and opinions.
• Hindsight Bias: Believing an event was more predictable after it has occurred.
• Different mindsets cause the same ambiguous information to have different interpretations.

Police Discretion

• Police discretion is the freedom make decisions in specific situations within general rules.
• The situations police face are hard to predict and often require quick reaction.
• The "right answer" often depends on the context.
• Risk is accepted to maintain autonomy.

The Good of Police Discretion

• Police can tailor decisions to specific victims or perpetrators.
• Police can respond without needing permission in many urgent situations.

The Bad of Police Discretion

• Responses to the same circumstances may vary among police officers.
• Laws and policies can be inconsistently applied.

The Ugly of Police Discretion

• Police misconduct, bias, and error can go undetected.
• Stress and mental health issues can arise among police.
• Mistakes happen because of decision processes outside of awareness.

Technology, AI, and Policing

• New technologies aim to help police make "better" decisions, catch lawbreakers, find suspects, and distribute decision-making.
• Distributing decsion-making can lead to more uniformed outcomes and does not necessarily mean better decisions.

Shot-Spotter

• Technology commonly used in the USA.
• Microphones are set up in a city to determine what loud sounds are and identify gunshots.
• Police are alerted to the location of a gunshot which puts them on high alert, thus potentially leading to bias.

Police Investigations

• Police are not as good at lie detection as they think they are, and they can unintentionally tunnel vision.
• "Tells" may be misinterpreted.

Investigator Bias

• Police judge themselves to be better at lie detecting than they are.
• Police believe the base rate of lying is higher than it is.
• Knowing ground truth is important in experiments, so we know who is lying.
• Police are more confident in deception judgments (response bias), but their judgments are no better (discrimination accuracy).
• With more training, police are more likely to say someone was deceptive, with no accuracy gain.
• Investigators may unintentionally tunnel vision if they think they have a suspect.
• Subjective or irrelevant information may be interpreted as meaningful.

Response Bias

• General tendency to choose one option over another, regardless of other factors.
• A positive response bias is the tendency to say that people are concealing more often than another group, not no accuracy gain.

Disciminability

• The extent to which someone is able to accurately distinguish between one option over another.

Preventing Cognitive Bias

• Encourage deliberate, analytic thinking rather than automatic responses.
• Reduce subjectivity and use standardized, objective protocols.
• Require decisions by two independent decision-makers.
• Expertise may increase reliance on automatic decision processes.
• Biases are inherent and automatic and thus hard to prevent.

Who Polices the Police?

• In Canada, a complex framework of domestic laws, internal and external oversight bodies, and civilian oversight exists.
• Public opinion is very important
• Courts decide what is acceptable and unintentional, but only in most serious cases.

Case: Tyre Nichols

• Stopped for reckless driving, multiple "confrontations" occurred before arrest.
• He complained that he was short of breath after his arrest.
• He was taken to hospital and died 3 days later from his injuries.
• Tyre's reckless driving charge was unsubstantiated.
• Extreme force was used.
• An officer drew his gun before Tyre tried to flee.
• The officers felt they had acted appropriately because they were part of the Scorpion Unit.

Scorpion Unit

• Scorpion Unit was meant to enforce proactive policing, stopping crimes before they occur.
• Proactive policing is usually framed positively.

Proactive Policing

• Increase policing, crack down on lower level crimes, and allow officers to stop and search people/vehicles.
• Community policing strategies are better ways of achieving this goal by education, interventions, and a regular, neutral police presence.

Predicting Crimes

• Police can stop civilians, question them, and search personal items and vehicles if reasonable.
• Civilians have a right to be free from unreasonable searches.
• Police and lay persons were equally bad at detecting concealed objects.
• Police were more likely to say the person was concealing (response bias) but were not better able to distinguish between those concealing and those not (discrimination accuracy).
• Training needs to change.

Rights of Accused

• Right to be informed promptly of the reasons for arrest/detention.
• Right to retain and instruct legal counsel without delay and to be informed of this.
• Right to remain silent.
• Right to be told about the availability of duty counsel and legal aid.
• People are free to leave if they are not yet in custody.

Criminal Profiling

• Criminal profiling identifies the major personality and behavioral characteristics of an individual based upon information about crimes they have committed.

Why Criminal Profiling is useful

• It focuses limited resources.
• It prevents the case going cold.
• It determines when multiple crimes might have been committed by the same individual.
• It formulates targeted interview/interrogation strategies.
• It can be used in court to motive.
• It evaluates the level and type of threat someone poses to society.

Criminal Profiling Process

• Profilers analyze the crime scene and gather data on the victims and study reports from the police and pathologist-coroner.
• They make inferences about the killer's motive or reasons
• They make inferences about the perpetrator's identity

Theoretical Base

• Profiling relies on classic trait model of personality.
• Assumes primary determinants of behavior are stable, internal traits.
• It also assumes perpetrator's behavior remains stable across crimes, contexts, and in their non-criminal life.
• Situational influences are very important in shaping behavior.

Underlying Assumptions

• Offenders behave consistently across crimes (modus operandi) with partial support - moderate levels of behavioral consistency across crimes, within and between offenders.
• There are reliable relationships between features of the offender's crime and their personal characteristics without support.

Ambiguous Profiles

• The profiles themselves tend to be ambiguous.
• 24% of profiles contained ambiguous information and legal professionals linked the same criminal profile to different suspects.
• Ambiguity means that it can be interpreted lots of ways and can also be molded or reframed to account for different people or circumstances.

Kocsis and Colleagues

• Accuracy was evaluated by comparing profilers to psychologists, detectives, students, and psychics.
• Participants were given case info about crimes that have been solved and gave them a multiple-choice questionnaire
• Profilers' conclusions agreed with what had been found once the case was solved more than those from other groups, but not by much.
• Accuracy was low overall.
• Criminal profiling is difficult and not very reliable.

Pinizzoto and Funkel (1990)

• Accuracy was evaluated by comparing profilers to students, clinical psychologists, and untrained police officers
• They were Evaluated info about homicides and sex offenses using info about crime scene and other forensic evidence
• Profilers studied more closely and for longer, also wrote lengthier reports.
• But accuracy was low for all, profilers were more accurate when profiling sexual offenders.

Deductive Criminal Profiling

• Profiling the background characteristics of an unknown offender based on evidence left at the crime scene (deduce characteristics )
• Underlying logic can be flawed, data so susceptible to bias.
• Depends on interpretation
• Profilers usually use multiple approaches.

Inductive Criminal Profiling

• Profiling the background characteristics of an unknown offender based on what we know about other solved cases (infer general info).

Organized vs Disorganized

Holmes and Holmes Classification

Visionary

• Have visions or hear voices from god or spirits instructing them to kill particular individuals.
• Killers are seen to have supernatural powers so mental illness is present.
• "Forced" to kill.

Mission-Oriented

• Motivated by a desire to kill individuals they regard as evil or unworthy.
• Cleans the world of undesirables (e.g. Ted Kaczynski)

Hedonistic

• Take sadistic sexual (or other) pleasure in torturing their victims.
• Kill for pleasure.

Power-Oriented

• Get satisfaction from capturing and controlling their victim.
• May capture and kidnap for a period (e.g. Ted Bundy).

Geographic Profiling

• Geographic profiling estimate the general vicinity in which a perpetrator likely lives/works, a missing person might be found, or the next crime might occur.
• Maps, statistics, the pattern of past crimes, and geographical features are used.
• Assumes that serial offenders will stay in a geographic comfort zone and will be restricted by available modes of transport.
• Anchor point: Location from which offenders leaves to commit crimes.
• Buffer zone: Area around home of offender where they might be less likely to commit crimes.
• Comfort zone: Area where offender is most comfortable committing crimes.
• Distance decay: Probability of a crime decreases as distance from past crime increases.
• Temporal sequencing: Over time, the geographical range of a serial offender's crime will increase.

Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System (VICLAS)

• VICLAS is an automated system that allows police to link crimes that are geographically disparate but similar in nature.
• Approx. 150 characteristics of crimes that investigators/police can enter into the system.
• A team of specially trained analysts look for clues as to whether crimes are related.
• Accuracy and whether the system is helpful in any particular case depends on reliability of information entered.
• Police submit a form to ViCLAS whenever they have a serious case.
• Crime linkage: Has a single perpetrator committed two or more crimes?
• Linkage blindness: Inability of law enforcement across different jurisdictions to note that crimes committed in respective jurisdictions may be related.
• ViCLAS designed to help reduce linkage blindness.

This lesson explores cognitive biases in police investigations and their potential impact on judgment and decision-making. It also covers topics like hiring processes, use-of-force cases in Canadian law enforcement, and proactive policing strategies.