ABSTRACT
The psychological issues that form the foundations for answering a number of important questions in criminal investigations are considered in this volume. These are shown to have their roots in the psychological study of individual differences. In the criminal context these differences relate to important variations between types of crimes and also within any type of crime. The notion of a hierarchy of criminal differentiation is introduced to highlight the need to search for consistencies and variations at many levels of that hierarchy. Consideration of this hierarchy also lends support to a circular ordering of criminal actions as a parallel with the colour circle. In developing the constituents of this ‘radex’ structure, it is proposed that the chapters in this volume support distinctions between criminals in terms of the intensity and seriousness of their crimes, the nature of their transactions with their explicit or implicit victims, the amount and type of expertise they bring to their crimes and the organisational and social contexts within which their crimes occur. The studies in this volume, then, show a slowly evolving behavioural science of crime that approaches the study of criminal actions from an objective, often statistical viewpoint rather than one based on personal intuition and clinical experience
David Canter is Director of the Centre for Investigative Psychology at the University of Liverpool. He has published widely in Environmental and Investigative Psychology as well as many areas of Applied Social Psychology. His most recent books since his award winning ‘Criminal Shadows’ have been 4Psychology in Action’ and with Laurence Alison ‘Criminal Detection and the Psychology of Crime’.
