Criminal Investigative Failures: Avoiding the Pitfalls (Part Two) 75 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 2006

75 FBI L. Enforcement Bull. 12 (2006)
Criminal Investigative Failures: Avoiding the Pitfalls (Part Two)

handle is hein.journals/fbileb75 and id is 329 raw text is:

art one of this article
focused on cognitive
biases and how they can
contribute to criminal investiga-
tive failures. Part two presents
probability errors and organiza-
tional traps that can lead inves-
tigations astray. It also offers
recommendations and addition-
al strategies that investigators
may find helpful.

PROBABILITY ERRORS
Probability and Psychology
Anyone who has spent a
few hours watching people
gamble will realize that prob-
ability is a difficult concept for

the human mind. Individuals
often use heuristics-and suf-
fer from biases-when dealing
with probability. Police officers
find it particularly hard to think
probabilistically. Because of
their street experiences, they
prefer black and white, rather
than shades of gray. Probability
errors in criminal justice most
often occur in the forensic sci-
ences but also can happen in
criminal profiling.

Coincidences and the
Law ofSmall Numbers
A common problem with
probability results from looking

for patterns in, or drawing
inferences from, a small number
of incidents. For example, an
analyst examines the dates for
a series of 15 street robberies
and observes that none of the
crimes occurred on a Thursday.
Is this pattern meaningful?
Probably not. With only 15
crimes, chances are at least one
day of the week will be free of
robberies.
Skeptics often say they do
not believe in coincidences.
However, when looking for
patterns within large numbers
of items (i.e., events, suspects),
coincidences are inevitable.

12 / FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin

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