LPRC - CrimeScience Episode 62 – Rethinking Investigations and Learning from Offender Movement Featuring Dr. Kim Rossmo (Texas State University)

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

“Offenders go where they know and know where they go.” Dr. Kim Rossmo, Research Professor at Texas State University, joins Dr. Read Hayes to discuss crime patterns, the geography of crime and policing, opportunistic versus intentional offenders, serial offenders, static and mobile targets, improving investigative thinking, connecting investigations to problem-solving, and much more. The post CrimeScience Episode 62 – Rethinking Investigations and Learning from Offender Movement Featuring Dr. Kim Rossmo (Texas State University) appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi everyone, welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Take advantage of the advanced video capabilities offered by Bosch to help reduce your shrink risk. Integrate video recordings with point-of-sale data for visual verification of transactions and exception reporting. data for visual verification of transactions and exception reporting. Use video analytics for immediate notification of important AP-related events and leverage analytics metadata for fast forensic searches for evidence and to improve merchandising and operations. Learn more about extending your video system beyond simple surveillance in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com.

Welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast. Today we're joined by Dr. Kim Rosmo of Texas State University. And Texas State has now got several very prominent criminologists. What we want to do is talk to Dr. Rosmo about really two focal points. to Dr. Rossmo about really two focal points. One is about criminal offender behavior and how that behavior interacts is partly driven or enabled or by space and place. And I think that's going to be particularly useful because there are implications for how we might better reduce victimization, convince offenders not to initiate or be able to progress their crimes. So Dr. Rossmo, and the second area, sorry, the second area is going to be, of course, on criminal investigations

and rethinking criminal investigations from a few viewpoints that Dr. Rossmo has got. And bear in mind, he's got some experience here. Dr. Rossmo is the University Endowed Chair in Criminology and the Director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation at Texas State University. He's got a Ph.D. in criminology from Simon Fraser University. But his area, his publications, and there are a lot of, not only a lot of them, but the quality and the usability of these papers are amazing. I've used them in teaching and building research and doing some other things quite a bit. But the geography of crime, the geography of policing, and of course, then some offender profiling that comes out of that. comes out of that. And Dr. Rossmo does a lot of work and has done with different groups, including the Police Foundation, the ATF, IACP, and so forth. So a wealth of knowledge and a nice

blend of actually being out there and interacting and understanding human behavior and criminality and offending in the real world, and then also combining that with an incredible amount of research and then developing very user-friendly tools for practitioners. So, with no further ado, thank you, Dr. Rosmo, for joining us on Crime Science today. My pleasure. So, I thought if we might, we would start with offenders, targets, and space. And maybe if you're up for it, a brief primer on opportunity theories in places and spaces and all the contributions that have come out of Canada, including yourself, and how you've built on that would be a great start. So people will often refer to a random crime, but that's not accurate.

They might be referring to a stranger crime or a crime they can't understand. But the reality is that most crimes, in particular predatory crimes where the offender has to search for a target, and this would apply to the majority of property crimes, they have underlying patterns, patterns in space and in time. So I like to think of a crime as the tip of an iceberg, and underneath the surface of the water, there's 90% of what was going on. And that's something that we find value to study. If this crime occurred at a certain spot, how did the offender come to choose this location? And I think it's important to understand that for a number of reasons.

But for prevention purposes, it's particularly important. It's also a value to investigations. So it's a general truism that offenders need to, they go where they know and they know where they go. So what I mean by that is every one of us has our routine activities, our daily and weekly rhythms where we get up, we go to work, we shop, we get gas at a certain place, etc. So this develops what Branningham and Branningham called our activity space, the places we socialize or visit, at least pre-pandemic days, and the travel routes between these. That generates for us our activity space, I mean, our awareness space. So activity space generates the awareness space. Those are locations we're aware of. Criminals will pick suitable targets within their awareness space. Now, what a suitable target is is going to depend, of course, on the type of criminal. And there's this term target back cloth,

which refers to the spatial and temporal arrangement of targets or victims for criminals to engage in. It's their opportunity structure. So if you're dealing with shoplifters, well, you need a store. If you're dealing with a car thief, you're probably going to be looking at, in many cases, parking lots. Someone who is a child molester will be focusing more on parks and schools. So you sort of have to think within the context of what is available, So you sort of have to think within the context of what is available and then what do offenders do to find the locations and the targets they choose to attack. And it's not a lot different from our shopping behaviors. So we need to think about that. We need to think about that crime is risky for the offender.

We need to think about the fact that we all are lazy fundamentally, including criminals, and they want to minimize their effort, least effort principle. And that often translates to not traveling any greater distances than necessary. Some offenders who are seeking bigger awards will travel much further than offenders who are looking for smaller awards. But these patterns are very, very consistent and have been studied around the world over the better part of the last century.

And I think that knowledge of how crime occurs and how offenders behave is the very foundation of trying to figure out how to prevent it. Fantastic build, and I couldn't agree more. And that's why we're excited to work with you today. So I guess, so leading into that and building on that, you know, there's a reason people do things. There's a reason they do things, certain things and do those certain things, certain places. And that's the heart and soul of what's going on with human behavior. And the idea of, hey, we're lazy. We're all looking for ways to maximize pleasure and comfort and ease. So can we kind of build on that, Kim, and talk a little bit about now opportunistic

and intentional search and engagement with targets and a little bit about what that looks like? search and engagement with targets and a little bit about what that looks like. How do you think about, because we know there's differential thinking and action by these offenders, as well as differentiation, of course, in their skill levels and experience. But how do you think about things and differentiate between opportunistic and intentional behavior, if you will? It's much more of a gray area than you might think. So the reality is only a small number of offenders are real professionals. Others are much more limited or scattered.

They, if they're drug addicts and they're using their time to, or the purpose of their crime is to obtain money to feed their drug habit, then they may be a little more focused, but only during certain time periods. There's a term that I like called premeditated opportunism, which means that even opportunistic crimes are often underlaid by previous planning and thinking experience. So I think when we take a look at offender decision-making generally, we have to recognize that it runs a gamut from very professional, planned, structured crimes to things that are more spur-of-the-moment. But many of those spur-of-the-moment things are, they have something underlying them. So, for example, and I want to come back to this point later, but I'll put a plug in for a study that Lucia Summers and I did with the National Institute of Justice.

And I believe you've done work with Dr. Summers before. But we published an article in the Journal of Justice Quarterly called Offender Decision Making and Displacement. We interviewed 200 repeat property offenders across Texas. Many of them were shoplifters and asked them about how they chose targets and how they responded to crime prevention efforts or control strategies. And we find that many of them integrate their criminal activities with their just normal routine. So let me give you a specific example. One offender is walking down the street because he's going to head to his friend's house. He just is paying attention to the cars parked there. If he happens to notice one or maybe he tries a few doors, one that's open, he's going to commit a crime so you could say that's very

opportunistic um but it also has a structure also tells you to lock the doors of your cars um because you the whole idea is to is to make the the effort level a little higher um we asked them about their perceptions of risk reward and effort So the higher the risk, the less likely property offenders are going to commit a crime. The more the effort, the less likely they are. The greater the reward, the more, sorry, the higher the risk and the more the effort,

the less likely they'll commit a crime, the greater the potential reward, then that's going to encourage them to offend. And there's some interesting things that came out of that that just gives you some idea. So every situation is unique. You go into a store and they're assessing what's going on. Some cases, they said they had friends that worked in the store who gave them a lot of background information about security levels. So even though their friend isn't

necessarily taking part in the crime, they're providing intelligence, which is useful for making these risk-reward decisions. If they saw cameras, that could deter them, but only if they thought the cameras were credible. A lot of security entities use fake cameras. They know this. In some cases, they know exactly which cameras are fake if they have inside knowledge. So the deterrence is going to be limited by whether or not there's any feasibility. Same with the security guard. Does the security guard look fit? Is he going to be able to, does he have policy support to make an apprehension? Is he going to be able to, does he have policy support to make an apprehension? Is he going to be able to chase after somebody? Offenders were also, more so than we expected, concerned about the simple fact of identification.

And we found some that said a police car would drive by. They wouldn't necessarily be deterred. The police car slows down and someone looks at them. They would be deterred. And of course, if they actually stopped and talked to them and, you know, took notes about who they were, that, that was a, a big deterrence because they're concerned about identification later on down the road. They have some general knowledge of the forensic capabilities and the ability

to do facial recognition, et cetera. and the ability to do facial recognition, et cetera. So they're always thinking about this risk, reward, and effort. But I want to then make the point that this can be modified by the influence of drugs and or alcohol. And there's two big things to consider here. And there's two big things to consider here. One is the need to buy drugs and or alcohol if you are addicted or you have some substance abuse issues. So that would drive the crime. The other one is if you are intoxicated or impaired or under the influence, if the offender

is intoxicated, impaired, or um under the influence that could affect affect their ability to take risks they may be much more likely to engage in crazy behavior um one offender said um that uh um for uh certain offenders using certain drugs they feel like they're supermen so you know we have to recognize that there's a range of activity and that rationality will be influenced by other factors. I'm not sure. I may have just gone off on some tangents there. So please bring me back if I haven't answered the question. No, you totally nailed it.

And I'm really excited you brought up that research. And then tying in, okay, what we do has to do with what we like to call theory, and most don't in the practical world, as we know. But you're talking about, so we're going to leverage how offenders tend to think. They are all different. They all have different backgrounds and skill levels and so forth. But all the back cloth, as you said, but at the end of the day, you know, is it something they want? Is there enough value in this? Is the reward great enough? And then now part of this not too pretty calculus is, all right, how hard, what's my effort here? And then time and so forth. And then finally, what's the real risk or my calculated risk that, you know

what, something could happen here that I might not like, like getting caught or punished or identified any way that might lead to that. So I like, so you tie in that effort, risk and reward calculus, whatever that may look like. And we know it's not clean, like the economists might wish for. But then you tie that into the mechanisms of action by what we do. So police, if they're driving by at whatever speed, you know, okay, I see them, but I don't view them as a near and clear and present danger to me. That's not a real threat, potentially. I ignore it. Wait, they're slowing down, I think. And that's probably because of me. Maybe I'm paranoid, but they're, oh, there's, I think they're looking. And then finally, you know, whoa, they're pulling over, they're coming over, they're starting to talk to me. So that informs how we protect, how we dose, you know, what the mechanisms of actions of the things that we do to protect people in places. So you went right into where I thought was very helpful. was very helpful. Could we talk a little bit about, go ahead, I'm sorry. Oh, I just wanted, just to follow up, the name of the article is Offender Decision Making and Displacement. And we found that one crime prevention strategy probably just results in them displacing to try another approach. And displacement is about how offenders respond to crime prevention or crime control.

And they can change the location. They can change the time they operate in. They could change the type of target they're looking at. They could change the type of strategy they're using. And they could change the type of crime they're committing. So we wanted to study how they would respond to these. I wanted to mention that one strategy may not be enough to deter them, but if you put in three, that seemed to be the turning point. It's also important that the

strategies be viable, that they look realistic, that they're not just theater, because experienced offenders have a lot of knowledge and they can obsess out when something is fake, and that will have very limited deterrent value, at least on these professional groups who had a minimum of three prior arrests. Excellent, excellent. And displacement is huge, and you know well, and we have the same on the private side, if you will, where displacement is understood somewhat superficially a lot of times. Well, they might not do it here. But as you said, well, they might not do it now,

or they might not do it this way, or they might not even target what they came for this time. Special displacement was the most common. Okay. And one thing we found of interest, if a vendor likes a particular store because they know the layout, they have a little experience there, they'd be more likely to, rather than going to a nearby store, going to that same store but somewhere else just because their comfort level was higher with that particular store, like a Walmart or a Home Depot. Interesting.

So, no, that's good insight. No, that's good insight. And then you talked about mono versus some kind of poly treatments, if you will, that, you know, let's look at it. Maybe there's two or three different mechanisms of actions going on here. Like we're trying to do with COVID-19. We may be attacking it in different ways. We may be protecting that target in different ways. Yes. Okay. Excellent. It's an additive nature of that. The interaction even of those separate treatments might add up to something even better. Okay, good. And for those out there listening, offender decision-making and displacement, Rossmo and Summers, looks like it's 2019. I've read this, but for those that don't know, and I know, and you know this too as well, Kim, that it's in JQ, Justice Quarterly, which is one of our top, top, top ranked journals in CRIM. But it's not

necessarily green. In other words, available to everybody. Unfortunately, most of these journals are behind paywalls. So they can pay the bills, I guess. But so I want to get that out there on the record if I could. So, you know, some of your early work and current work and well-used work involves sort of serial offenders and their hunting process, if you will, and some of their patterns and how you look at that and some of the tools you've built to help maybe better predict or prognosticate anyway, and then solve. Can you, Dr. Rossmo, talk a little bit about that process? A lot of my prior research and operational experiences has been in the area of this term geographic profiling. So this is typically applied to cases with multiple crimes or multiple locations. And I want to differentiate that. You could have, by multiple crimes, you could have a serial arsonist or a serial rapist, and you have a number of crimes the same person has committed

that have been linked together. Or you could have one crime, but a number of locations, which sometimes occurs with, say, a kidnapping case, and you've got cell phone tower data, or a bomb maker who makes purchases from several different locations that can be tracked back. The idea is because this process of choosing a location is not random, we can use the information from multiple crimes to determine the most probable location of offender residents. We use a piece of software called Rigel. We input the locations of the connected crimes, and that produces for us something called a jeopardy surface, which is a three-dimensional probability surface, which you can use now to prioritize your suspects or your information in

the investigation. So that is even if you get something like a horrendous serial killer, their crime location choices are not random. And while we couldn't do much with one crime, you start to get a number of crimes and the rules of probability are such that we can start to get a pretty good focus, then that is used for suspect prioritization or for information management in terms of investigative decision-making to help focus the usually limited resources a police agency may have. Excellent. So do you just talk any more, between, say, I remember terms in the past, hunter style, trapper, those that are hunting in nearby geographical areas, those that are maybe travel somewhere else and then do that, or those that wait, the spider in the web. Is that something that's still relevant, Dr. Rosmo? Is that something that's still relevant, Dr. Rosmo?

Yes. So when you're first doing this research, it seemed important to understand the differences between how various offenders hunted or searched for victims. And some of this work was inspired by foraging theory that biologists have done. So how do lions find their prey? Or how do birds find insects in a field? We studied their spatial patterns, their movements, what they found optimal, and the different techniques. For criminals, we found that often most criminals would go in a very simple, what we called a hunter style. And they're looking for a victim. For the most part,

they're looking in locations they have previous experience with. We found some would engage in a strategy, and now we're talking about violent offenders, that would bring victims into them. Then once they were under some control in the environment that the victim had, sorry, in the environment that the offender controlled, then the offender would attack. We found some would commute to an entirely different area to engage in a crime, though it's usual that they had some sort of base there. You know, if you live in a big city, you're probably familiar with the fact that many of your colleagues live in a suburb or even in another town. They commute into the central part of the city to work, et cetera. I live in Austin, Texas. I work in San Marcos, Texas. That's about a 30-mile travel thing. So I have activities and locations in both places. And we also consider how, in addition to the search and the hunt, the type of attack offenders would engage in. So this was

important and useful to understand their geography. If we have an unsolved case, for the most part, we're just looking at a series of locations, maybe times, and we're trying to work backwards to understand more about the offender and where he or she might be based. And so that was the purpose of the hunting style typology. And other people, for example, Eric Borbergard at Simon Fraser University has done a lot of work with us as well on sex offenders. It's also important, I think, to understand the difference between targets that are static and those that are mobile. What I mean by that is if you want to break into a house, well, that's a static target. You know that target's always going to be there. that's a static target. You know, that target's already always going to be there. But if you are going to be a purse snatcher or sexually assault a woman walking home from a bus stop, well,

those targets are mobile. They may not be there at another time. And I think this is also a good segue into the importance of understanding the temporal patterns. So we have at least three temporal patterns that are important in crime. What is time of day? What time of day does the crime occur? So pre-COVID-19, most residential burglaries happened in the daytime when people were at work. Commercial burglaries would happen at nighttime when people weren't there. You have day of week patterns, often with the weekend being very busy for certain types of crimes. You finally have sort of seasonal or monthly patterns. And these affect weather, and they affect light, lighting. So in Vancouver, studies of burglaries, many of which committed by juveniles, peaked in the period when school and it's now dark,

but people are not yet home from work. And that was kind of a peak time period in which they could offend. A famous case in Southern California called the chair burglary case. The offender broke into homes in the evening, which is very unusual, but he picked weekends when people were out visiting friends or at restaurants. And that was actually, because that was a departure from sort of the normal routine, it provided some useful clues. And one of those was, how does the offender know that people are away? Because no one had ever seen him. There were no witnesses to this guy. It was a bit of a shadow. And that informed

what they looked for at the crime sites. And they found that most of these places that had been targeted backed up onto a green belt, which suggested the offender was walking through the green belt, looking through the windows and finding places where there was no activity. And that would tell them what to go into. But that, knowing how the offender hunts, allowed the police to know how to hunt to find them. Excellent. And you can well imagine, you know, working with the big drug chains and others that arm robberies are a problem. And so now we've got a particular issue with serial robbers in this case. A lot of them are crews instead of just an individual. But again, those crews seem to come and go.

They're very opportunistic in their own nature. papers, which you're on, half of them to understand search and attack methods and how you guys look at, you know, how they approach and the choice for their attack location and things like that. So, any thoughts at all on that? Yes, go ahead. Well, I just want to add one more point there is that an offender is not going to target a place or attack it if he's not aware of it. So the very first thing to do is to make sure that to limit the exposure to offenders. So I live in a private driveway off of a public street, and we don't allow people onto the private driveway, even if they're distributing flyers or brochures. If they're not even aware of what's there, that reduces our risk of being victimized significantly. So step one, make sure they don't know about you.

Perfect. And you know, I'll tell you what, we're doing research with, you can imagine who on porch piracy with some of the chains and groups. And I love it. That's kind of the first recommendation. I love the validation of that, that, you know, if the parcel was put behind or in a box or behind a plant or planter or something, that the offender doesn't know about it, I'm not sure the next domino is going to tip. Yeah, that's absolutely true. Hide it behind a pillar. Make sure you have some sort of camera on your doorbell. Make sure there's a sign telling them you have a camera.

And the other part of this, too, is the inside knowledge, which we talked about before. So I would start to give you an example of someone delivering restaurant flyers who tells his friend about, hey, you know, this house looked pretty good. We found for many serial sex offenders, a lot of the victims would, they wouldn't have their drapes closed. And so they can peer in the windows and they can see what's going on. You know, we had two serial rapists in the Vancouver area that were targeting single mothers. Their MO was to break in and threaten the child of the single mother to gain compliance. But then that raised the question, how do these two guys know what places to break into where there would be a single mother with a

child? And when we actually visited the sites, the answer to that was pretty simple. They're going to the right neighborhood that has the right demographics. And these places didn't have fences and they didn't have curtains. We would go there, myself and the RCMP, we'd look through the windows. We can see, you know, trikes and other indicators, it was not at all difficult to figure out who lived there. So denying that basic knowledge increases offenders uncertainty increases their risk, and is a very useful crime prevention thing, no matter what type of crime we're talking about. Remember, we go where we know, and we know where we go. But if they don't know something, they just might decide to move along. And I'll circle right back to the importance of

insiders who may not actively be engaged in theft, but still provide intelligence of great value to friends or relatives who are offenders, and that gives them a foot up. Excellent, excellent. So now if we could turn over to rethinking criminal investigations, my words, but also I know that's a large area of interest for you and a critical need for law enforcement, and in this case for loss prevention as well. Can you maybe launch into it? How do you look at criminal investigations? How do we explain the variance of successful versus maybe not so successful investigations? But what are some changeable things about that? What are some variables that we can actually affect? That

seems to be part of your line of thinking. If you could talk a little about that, Kim, that'd be great. So the clearance rate, which is proportion of crimes that are solved by the police, has dropped significantly in the United States. And perhaps the metric people pay the most attention to is the homicide clearance rate, which despite the fact that murders have dropped significantly per capita since 1991, we keep seeing this declining proportion of them that are solved. This applies to most other crimes, not all. There's also incredible variation between cities in the United States and between the United States and other countries. So Britain, for example, solves about 90% of its homicides. The United States a couple of years ago dropped to a historic low of 59%. No one really knows why.

Some of the theories are lack of resources, inability, sorry, failure of communities to support the police by agreeing to be witnesses. A lot of things that exist sort of on a larger macro level. I think it's very clear that police departments are not going to solve crimes without community support. An old study in the 1970s done by the Rand Corporation found that in actual fact, most crimes were solved by members of the public. And then second of all, by patrol officers and detectives were the third most common group for solving crimes. So detectives need good communication and cooperation levels with patrol officers, and the police department needs good community cooperation. So that's essential to solving crime. The forensics and the DNA and

the state-of-the-art stuff is all valuable. And let's remember that's evidence and information that solves crimes, but without that larger context of support, it's not going to happen. I think there's also increasing legal hurdles and bureaucracies that have sometimes led to police departments being able to do less with the same amount of resources. And as a consequence, and this is hardly new, this goes back to the early days of the Thames River Police, private corporations are picking up some of that slack and they're doing what they need to do as well. And last time I looked at this was some time ago, but the private security industry is much bigger in terms of personnel and money spent than the public security industry, i.e. the police. So they play a very important role. I think one of the things we can do is improve our information, in particular our information sharing. So I know in many cases where a criminal was arrested by one agency, it was so clear by

analyzing their cell phone data that they were engaged in criminal activity, including some of that hunting behavior in other agencies. The first agency gives them all this information on a platter, but can ignore it and continue to ignore it and still drive your car. Then one day you're going to pay a serious price. And that's something to think about, the sort of the level of cooperation, the level of information sharing, the importance of gathering evidence. And one of my major areas of interest has been criminal investigative failures. And most of those are evidence failures and also biases. I think that we have to realize that we're human beings. Everyone has biases. And I'm not talking here about the biases that are in the

news all the time. I'm talking here just about our decision making that gets distorted by things we want. I would say to give you an example of the typical criminal investigative failure is you get a high profile crime, maybe a horrible murder. There's a lot of pressure on investigators. The police rush to make a judgment. They prematurely shift from an evidence based investigation where they're collecting and analyzing evidence to a suspect-based investigation where they go, okay, I know who did it. And in the cases I've studied or some of the ones I've been involved with, sometimes they made that shift within hours and they have only a fraction of the evidence. But once their mind is made up, it's very hard to get them to change their mind. They start to have very distorted perceptions of the evidence and things just go sideways after that.

So it's all about logical, analytical thinking based on all the evidence, making sure that you don't have premature judgment, keeping your mind open and doing everything you can to get all the evidence. Because evidence has a shelf life, whether it's evidence at a crime scene exposed to the weather or a witness with memory. You need to get that evidence. You need to get it soon. You need to talk to neighbors. You're canvassed. You need to interview witnesses. You need to do everything you can thoroughly and properly. But underlying some of these problems, of course, are resource limitations. And I greatly worry about all the discussions and clamors, which I think are highly irresponsible to defund the police, because we'll pay a price for that down the road. And some cities are already reporting increased crime rates. So these are

things that, of course, are happening at a political level. But if people are not going to cooperate with the police, we're going to have a problem. It goes back to Sir Robert Peel, where he said, the police are the people, the people are the police. And we need to kind of remember that at all times. But yeah, investigations really need to improve. There are some cities that have about only 30% of their homicides they ever solve. And this creates a bit of a feedback loop where the public goes,

well, the police aren't doing me any good. They're not solving my brother's murder. And then when it comes time for the police to look for witnesses for a crime, well, they don't trust the police. They don't want to cooperate. So witnesses don't come forward. And that's a vicious cycle that needs to be broken because we all want to live in safe communities.

But some of us don't. Great insight and feedback. And, you know, I was curious, now in law enforcement, if there are data, if there's a paper, I haven't actually seen one yet, but that may be me. But that discusses, you know, what proportion of agencies have actual investigator or detective training courses where, okay, you're now going to be assigned, you're going to become a detective. So you're going to go through criminal investigations 101 and 102 and so forth. I know in our industry don't necessarily have that. We've got some really nice new certifications. We've got a lot of interview and interrogation training, but not so much on how to actually

conduct, organize and conduct an evidence-based investigation. If I go back over to you, what does that look like in the public sector? Well, that's a really good point. So I talked earlier about how the United Kingdom has a much higher clearance rate than the U.S. does for murder. Canada's between the U.S. and the U.K. But one of the things that the U.K. has is national systems and policies for all policing, partly because the federal government provides a lot of funding for all the police agencies. And the smallest police agency in the UK is a thousand officers. So they're able to exert a different level of control. The United States, the average size of a police agency is

probably like 19 officers. So those are very small. It's a lot harder to have standardization in training when you're dealing with things on such a small local level. There is some training that exists. When I was at the Vancouver Police Department, I took a number of courses, but I noticed, I thought it was unusual that none of my training, and this actually is true for most places, tells investigators how to think like a detective. So it's just kind of assumed. They'll talk about databases and legal updates and strategies and tactics, but they don't talk about actually how to think about all the evidence, how to put it all together, which is one of the reasons I became interested in this in the first place, especially when I saw some bad decision-making occur that I've considered to be somewhat illogical. So what we need is more training. We need better training. Dr. Jerry Ratcliffe, who you are probably familiar with because of the work he does in this area, and I have submitted a proposal to the National Institute of Justice where we wanted to identify

what agencies considered their best investigators and figure out what training was optimal, what helped them become really good investigators or what personnel selection criteria made them good investigators? Even though we got good reviews, NIJ didn't fund the project. We'll try again next year. But, you know, maybe here's another thing. There's not that much government focus in terms of research on investigations and what there is tends to be on the technical scientific side. But at the end of the day, this is all about the people and all the best tools in the world are not helpful unless you can get detectives thinking about how to use them. And I think this

is also applies to sort of the whole process of an investigation. So if I could be very specific about what I'm talking about, and I'm going to use my own city of Austin, they would take months between the point of time of collecting a fingerprint from a crime scene and actually submitting it to the database. And a couple of years ago, it hit the media, there was this prolific burglar who had been identified, but basically he was allowed to run for free for nine months because the fingerprint had not been submitted. And it's not like he was taking a holiday. He was an active, prolific burglar. But because of resource issues or misprioritization, the fingerprint just sat there for nine months. So the whole thing has to work together in concert.

And that's public, police, crime scene, detectives. Detectives have been criticized by the Rand study and others as being more bureaucrats than actually the type of detectives that, you know, we would envision from our experiences reading novels or watching TV. And I think it's become one of the least focused on areas. I'm a member of a couple of major organizations in American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. And I looked at the conference agendas one year where they actually had a breakdown. Even though policing is perhaps one of the largest areas of study, only 2% of the

papers were on investigations. So even in academia, for the most part, investigations get ignored. And that's a problem. Investigations won't get better without more research, without more training, and maybe a better knowledge of what type of people can do investigations. We want people that are flexible, that are willing to look at the evidence, not be victims of a rush to judgment. be victims of a rush to judgment. We want them to be dedicated and thorough, to have good interpersonal skills. But, you know, this stuff is understudied. Great, great insights again. And, you know, that was a major area of interest for me in talking about, yeah, how do we maybe make the core, develop courses, evidence-based courses? And I certainly wish I could be a peer reviewer on that, the proposal you all have or are considering submitting to NIJ to endorse. But that sounds fantastic, understanding exactly how you do it.

And you mentioned novels, and we've got TV shows, particularly sort of the British TV shows that are so good to me. Anyway, they're interesting. But yeah, that are so good to me anyway. They're interesting. But, yeah, that's where you see the successful individuals. They spend a lot more time thinking about and collecting the evidence than otherwise working and becoming bureaucrats. We know you've got a report, but I think report writing was the other thing. Are people able to even explain in a written form exactly based on this, we came on this, you know, all the logic train thesis, if you will, seems to be another area of opportunity in that whole process. I saw something recently where somebody had asked

police agencies about what were the characteristics they were looking for when they hired people. about what were the characteristics they were looking for when they hired people. And I was a bit surprised to see this, but it makes sense if you think about it. They said that one of the most important things was the communication skills, both written and oral, of anyone they hired. Perfect. Perfect. And it goes to what you said on the front end, that with patrol and engaging with the public, getting to know them to the extent that you can, but establishing some credibility and confidence with them. And then when we've got a problem, you know, you're going to pick up a lot more. And that's why, like you said, they're a huge source of patrol of intelligence information and knowing where to go, who to talk to, and maybe even providing some insights because they're picking it up. Yes.

That detectives can't. So I think that leads to now where we want to kind of wrap, and that is talking about connecting investigations to problem solving, engaging detectives, your premise around engaging detectives in crime prevention. How do we leverage their experience, their observations, their expertise in that process? Well, I'm going to do another plug for another article, which was written by John Eck and myself. John Eck's at the University of Cincinnati, and he was one of the very early people involved in the whole pop movement.

And what we did was wrote a piece about rethinking detectives. And some of it are things we've talked about so far today, but it sort of focuses then on problem solving. So again, to go back to Peel, it's much better to prevent a crime, you know, than to have to resolve it by an arrest after the fact. So problem solving, I've had experience with that in some problem neighborhoods in Vancouver for my policing days, and I'm a big fan. I think there's significant potential with problem solving. significant potential with problem solving. I don't exclude the need to investigate and arrest,

especially the prolific professional offenders, but a lot of things can either be eliminated or reduced by problem solving efforts. But it seems to be something that police departments are, But it seems to be something that police departments are, in many cases, reluctant to embrace. And I'm not sure why. Problem solving has been shown in so many fields to be highly successful. There's a lot of parallels between medicine and policing. You know, you want to prevent a crime in the first place. You want to avoid surgery. You often need to sort of maintain or manage issues. You need evidence. You need analysis. I don't see that happening anytime soon, but to the degree that we could reduce problems because they were or those problems that were situational in nature.

There's just huge potential there. And I think it's underutilized. from an overly legalistic focus, now I'll blame the lawyers here, on how we might deal with some of the issues in the criminal justice system. So we don't need to arrest. It's one of the things I used to tell rookies who were working with me. I said, don't make an arrest, or sorry, I said, always ask yourself the question,

why am I making this arrest? You know, is it a good idea? What are the other options? But the incident-based focus, whether it's in patrol work or in detective work, prevents a problem-solving approach. One of my pet peeves because of my work on serial crime is a failure of many agencies to even look for other crimes that might be linked to the crime you're initially investigating. So that effort to step back and say, all right, this rape or this burglary, what else might it be connected to? And people that do that often have much more success because they can see

underlying patterns, they can identify common suspects, and they can then wrap up a lot of cases by focusing on the most prolific offender. And I'll use the chair burglary case in Irvine, California, again, as an example. The crime analyst there was asked by their special investigative team to take a look at these burglaries. And her analysis identified some commonalities, which led them to do a geographic profile. They put patrol efforts, sorry, surveillance efforts out. And the very first night they identified the person they were looking for. But one of the things that the analyst, Lori Velarde, did was say, look, you're not going to catch this guy in the act. Catching criminal burglars in the act is really, really challenging. Instead, what I want you to do, because I don't think this guy's local based on the factors of the cases,

just collect license plate numbers of everyone you see in the peak area of the GEO profile on the peak nights where this offender has been shown to be busy. And the very first night they got a plate, which when they ran it, came up to a car rental company up in Downey. And that led to arrest of an individual who by his own admission was responsible for a million dollars of thefts in every single year. And he'd been active at least for 10 years. Fantastic. So another good example of how we create these learning loops and these action loops. And for those out there, this article we're talking about is in Criminology and Public Policy,

a journal that those of us that are in ASC, which is American Society of Criminology, received this. And here, trying to go from S2P, science to practice, as we talk about a lot, and the new detective rethinking criminal investigations, Ekin Rosmo, and another recent article, 2019, here. And this is one of the reasons I put this. I really want to emphasize this, is how do we improve investigations? There's, you know, to me, I'll just let you know, we have organized retail crime. I'm sure you're familiar with that. These are quasi-organized to very organized groups of all sizes and shapes, and they do commit fraud, some violence, mostly theft in all forms. But there's those investigators are particularly skilled on the retail side. And in many agencies, not most,

but many agencies actually have now one or more detectives assigned to ORC. And that's where they work extensively on these. So you're going to see some pretty top-notch investigations going on in that with those teams. And then again, a lot of the internal investigators that we have in these companies, but there's always, always room for improvement. And that's why this discussion is so important. And these articles, based on the research that you all have done and the policy and practice implications that you're putting out there are critical. Anything I've missed, you hear good reporters say that, I'm going to ask you that, Dr. Rosmo, today, anything you think that this group, and this group does include law enforcement, as well as private practitioners and academics. So you started off by talking about trying to learn from those people who actually have engaged in offending. And while I might have,

you know, lots of experience as an investigator and as a patrol officer, that level of experience pales by comparison to someone who was engaged in committing crimes on a, you know, daily basis for years of their lives. So if you go back to the first part of the 19th century, the French police turned Eugene Francois Vidocq, who was a famous criminal, into a police officer. And he provided all sorts of ideas and insights and strategies. The saying, set a thief to catch a thief. So I think there's much that we can learn by paying attention to offenders, to what they do, to how they respond to what we do.

Dr. Summers and I wrote another paper about red teaming in criminal investigations. And the military do this all the time. They say, OK, we're going to do a war game. Our side's the blue team and you guys will play the role of the red team and you try to thwart what we're doing. And these are very valuable lessons that can be learned from this type of war gaming. But we don't do that often enough in crime prevention or policing. If we do X, what might the offender do? And then how can we be prepared and respond to that?

And I think in particular, people that have been criminals are going to have even better insight to how they might get around these particular strategies. criminals are going to have even better insight to how they might get around these particular strategies. And so, you know, again, this all takes some work and effort and learning, but it's worth it. And then it's very important to try to pass this on to others so we all benefit. And rest assured, I will pull that article as well. Well, I just want to, again, express how grateful we are to have you on today. You know, the combination of experience and solid science, but taking that combination to real-world practice is incredible and valuable and valued by us and our listeners and members. So, I want to thank you again, Dr. Rossmo. And of course, in this bizarro

2020 time, wish you best wishes and safe passages through this 2020 experiment. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more Crime Science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Laws Prevention Research Council.