Research carried out by the University of Granada and the Institute of Criminology of the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) has shown thatpolicemen and ordinary citizens have a different logic when making decisions than criminalsIn other words, they use different reasoning when acting, information that could have important implications for criminal justice.
To carry out this work, Rocío García-Retamero and Mandeep K. Dhabi carried out a study in which they selected a sample of 120 volunteers:40 criminals, 40 expert policemen, and 40 students unfamiliar with the field of crime. Police officers had worked for the security forces for an average of 19.4 years and had focused primarily on investigating robbery cases, while criminals had committed an average of 57.2 robberies.
The research participants had to estimate the weight of certain keys as predictors of the probability of theft in a property. Some of thesekeysthey werehave the mailbox full or empty; lights on or off; the fact that the dwellings were flats or houses, or that the floors were more or less cared fors. They also had to classify them hierarchically, depending on the degree to which they predicted the probability of success in robbery in said property. For example, for the key “security in the building” it was said: “Imagine two buildings: one of them has an anti-theft alarm system, the other does not. To what extent are they more likely to rob the property without an anti-theft alarm system? Which one does it have? “. To give the answer, the participants had to circle a value between zero and one hundred on a scale with intervals of ten points. After that, the participants were classified depending on the strategy used.
Substantial differences
The results of the study have shown thatthieves and police officers show substantial differences in estimates of the importance and ranking of the parametersabout a robbery. Thus, thecopsand novice participants agree thatthe mode of access to the property is the key to greater predictive power when it comes to predicting the success of the theft. These estimates contrast with those made bycriminals, who consider that the key to the greatest predictive power is whether it possessesanti-theft alarm.
The results of this work suppose, in the words of its authors, “a novel contribution to the study of the differences between experts and novices, and could have important implications for criminal justice and thedecision-making models“.
