Modelling Criminal Offences
| Author | A. Dale |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X9707000204 |
| Published date | 01 April 1997 |
| Date | 01 April 1997 |
SERGEANT A. DALE, Ph.D
Northumbria Police
MODELLING CRIMINAL OFFENCES
Introduction
The prevention and detection of criminal offences are responsibilities of
the police. The scope of these responsibilities is vast, ranging from petty
juvenile offending to serious, sometimes serial, sexual assaults and murder.
The definition of criminal offences is to be found in the criminal law but
the bare definitions of what constitute wrongdoings are accepted as an
inadequate base from which to develop policeinvestigative expertise. There
are many aspects to the body ofprofessional knowledge that the police have
developed over the years and one of the more recent acquisitions is known
as "offender profiling". This emerging science seems set to develop into
a number of areas of police work and one of the reasons for this is that it
provides one focus for the marriage of behavioural sciences with policing
to develop professional expertise in new areas.
Traditionally, the police have utilized and developed knowledge within
the domain of the "natural" sciences. Expertise in physics, chemistry and
biology has been used for many years and the pragmatic appeal of the
natural sciences has meant that seldom has an extension of work within this
field been met with reluctance or suspicion. Hard, tangible evidence is
sought after by investigating officers because it can represent
incontrovertible proofof guilt or innocence. Conversely, the softer, social
or behavioural sciences have toofrequently been seen as "woolly" by police
officers who may consider themselves as hard-headed, down-to-earth
individuals. Forensic psychiatrists and psychologists have been accepted
as experts to provide opinions in serious cases in courts of law for many
years. But it is really only since the late 1970s and early 1980s that these
fields of expertise have been seen as relevant to street level policing. In
short, hard evidence occupies along-established niche when it is used to
inform investigations; social sciences on the other hand have appeared too
abstract to assist the investigative process.
Successful crime scene interpretation depends upon the successful
interpretation of the various pieces of data which can be assembled.
Typically, concrete evidence such as fingerprint or DNA evidence will be
of primary concern and as such may well stay as the main planks of
prosecution evidence in a case. However, the abilities to plot the course
of an offence and to interpret the hard evidence in an appropriate manner
can assist in the gathering of such evidence and in the focusing of an
investigation. This article argues that the different emphases placed upon
criminal activity analysis - for example, by academic criminological
studies, crime pattern analysis, repeat victimization studies and offender
profiling - result from complementary and interdependent methods of
gaining insight into the same problem area. Each approach is essentially
a different method of examining ranges from the same pool of crime data.
Each approach, therefore, can provide information relevant to the process
104 The Police Journal April 1997
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