THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYare more accurate. These misconceptions have serious consequences for
justice. According to one estimate, 76 percent of wrongful convictions
have been caused by misplaced trust in dubious eyewitness testimony.
The reality when it comes to memories for dramatic events – so-called
flashbulb memories – is that they are extremely persistent, but not
particularly accurate. This was borne out by research on people’s memo-
ries for the 9/11 terror attacks. In 2003 a study found that 73 percent of 569
college students recalled watching the first plane hitting the north tower
of the World Trade Center on TV the day that it happened. The reality
is that the video footage of this event wasn’t shown until 12 September.
Criminal profiling
While fictional criminal psychologists usually get their man (or
woman), real life has thrown up some disastrous mistakes. In London,
in the early 1990s, the hunt for the killer of Rachel Nickell involved
an elaborate but ill-judged undercover operation to entrap the chief
suspect Colin Stagg. Later acquitted in court, Stagg had fitted the
profile of a sexual deviant and fantasist drawn up by Paul Britton, a
forensic psychologist who later wrote about the case, and others he’d
worked on, in The Jigsaw Man (1998).
A US profiling case that went badly wrong took place in 2002 when
police were advised that the Beltway sniper, who had shot and killed
ten people in Washington DC, was probably a lone white man. The
advice threw the hunt for the killer temporarily off course. In the end
the culprit, John Allen Muhammad, turned out to be black and had
been operating with a young accomplice who was also black.
Despite these high-profile errors, there is an intuitive logic to criminal
profiling. There’s no doubt that a criminal’s modus operandi can provide
the police with useful clues to direct their search. While the movies
highlight criminal idiosyncrasies such as unusual means of entry, a
taste for kitsch jewellery or gruesome murder-rituals, in reality the most
reliable clues can be something as banal as where a crime occurred.
In a recent analysis of solved Northamptonshire burglaries, Lucy
Markson at the Institute of Criminology showed that two burglaries
by the same person (known as “linked crimes”) were more likely to
have occurred closer together geographically than two burglaries
by two different people. Timing was found to be another important
factor – linked crimes tended to occur closer together in time as well as
geographical distance. David Canter, the first British psychologist to be
consulted by the police and the founder of the International Academy
for Investigative Psychology, says that this is the way forward for criminal
profiling – finding patterns in large data-sets of criminal behaviour and
using these to help narrow the hunt for the perpetrators of new crimes.