Reading And Assessing Police Evidence Paper

Reading and Assessing Police Reports Reading and assessing police reports is an essential part of law enforcement. It allows investigators to discover patterns of crime, and allows analyst to convey this discovery to police officers. This data can be used to formulate a suspect of a crime and what area they are committing crimes. Analyzing these reports allows officers to gain valuable intelligence and in-sight to an offender’s criminal conduct.

What is a crime series? Crime series is defined as a “set of crimes believed to have been committed by the same offender or offenders” (Velarde, 2014, p.67). What makes crime series unique in assessing crime is linking physical evidence that an offender establishes between crimes. Offenders

“Physical evidence usually involves objects found at the scene of a crime. Physical evidence may consist of all sorts of prints such as fingerprints, footprints, handprints, tidemarks, cut marks, tool marks, etc.” (US Legal, 2015). Examining physical evidence found at the crime scene allows investigators to link related crimes through forensic analysis to establish a crime series.

Offender Description Offender description is another important factor to link offenders to a crime series. Offenders build; age, name, height, eye color, type of clothing worn, complexion, body type, mannerisms, and identifying marks can be used to generate a suspect profile. Investigators can use these descriptions as a tool to accurately connect a multitude of crimes to an offender based on prior description data.

Distance and decay Distance decay is defined as “the decreasing probability of an offender traveling far from home to commit a crime” (Paynich & Hill, 2014, p.75). An offender’s activity will decrease as they distance themselves away from their

One example of how an offender will most likely offend in their neighborhood is burglaries. Offenders will not break into a home of their neighbor so they will not draw attention to their anchor point. They will however commit a burglary a few blocks away on a home that they know the routine of the people residing there to increase their anonymity.

Methods used by offenders to commit crime There are four methods an offender uses to find targets for crime. The first is the hunter method. The hunter method can best be described as an offender who leaves their residence for the sole purpose of finding a victim. A poacher describes an offender that will commute to a different area to commit crimes. Trollers are offenders that perform their daily routines as they deviously come upon a victim. Finally, trappers are offenders that purposefully conceive ways for a victim to meet with them.

Most often used