Psychology and investigations

This chapter outlines the ways in which psychology can interact with and contribute to the investigative process. The contributions psychologists can make to investigations fall within three broad areas. The first of these is the examination of the styles and patterns of criminal action within offenders’ behaviour and the unravelling of how these relate to psychological and social characteristics, sometimes referred to as ‘offender profiling’. The work of psychologists can be used here to help in the identification of the sorts of individuals that may be responsible for a crime that is under investigation. Although sometimes assumed only to be relevant to serious, serial or sexual crimes, in fact these ‘investigative inferences’ can be derived for all forms of criminality from burglary or fraud or arson through to serial killing, kidnapping and terrorism.