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What is Investigative Psychology?

Investigative psychology (IP) is a framework for the integration of a diverse range of aspects of psychology into all areas of criminal and civil investigation.

It is concerned with all the forms of criminality that may be examined by the police, from arson and burglary to murder, rape or even terrorism. The discipline also extends to cover those areas of activity that require investigation but may not always be conventionally within the domain of police services.

These may include matters such as insurance fraud, corruption, malicious fire setting, tax evasion or smuggling. Increasingly, issues of crowd control and public order are also being studied by investigative psychologists. The main concern is the ways in which criminal activities may be examined and understood in order for the detection of crime to be effective and for legal proceedings to be appropriate. As such, investigative psychology is concerned with psychological input to the full range of issues that relate to the management, investigation and prosecution of crime.

The contributions that psychologists can make to police investigations are most widely known and understood in terms of ‘offender profiles’. Offender profiling, as typically practised, is the process by which individuals, drawing on their clinical or other professional experience, make judgements about the personality traits or psychodynamics of the perpetrators of crimes. A well-known South African profiler is the psychologist Micki Pistorius, who has worked on a number of highprofile South African cases (Pistorius, 2000, 2002). From the perspective of scientific psychology, however, such a process is flawed in its reliance on clinical judgement rather than actuarial assessment. These flaws have been shown in extensive studies first reviewed by Meehl (1954).

The clinically derived theories upon which much ‘offender profiling’ has relied are equally questioned by research psychologists.

The lack...