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definition:  used to screen and evaluate the information in an offense/incident report to determine if there is sufficient information to warrant a follow-up investigation.  Such factors include whether suspects are named, the existence of significant physical evidence, the use or display of deadly weapons, and similarities to recently reported crimes.

Solvablility factors are elements of information that have been demonstrated to correlate with higher probabilities of investigative success.  

Informants provide information that is of investigative significance.  They expect to be paid or to recieve consideration on the charges pending against them or family members, or they cooperate for some other reasons.  They may also be designated as confidential informants (cooperating individual). 

Law enforcement policies generally state that investigators should refrain from doing activities that may cause them to be unprofessional with them.  These can include: socializing with them, becoming romantically involved, paying them without confirmation of the information, entering into a business relationship with them, accepting gifts/gratitudes/money from them, and loaning them money or accepting a loan from them. 

Restrictions typically apply to persons under 18 years of age, those who have been previously used but found unreliable, former drug-dependant individuals, and those on federal or state parole/probation.

Informant file (restricted access) consists of recent photo, detailed sheet of information of person, warrants, criminal background, debrifing reports, cases where informant is a defendant.

Is when a group of people that fit the description of the suspect are lined up in a row and compared to eachother in hopes of finding the true suspect.  

Problems that occur:  people are of different hights, they could appear to be shaved or not shaved, they could appear to be dresses differently than what the victim/witness remembers, the person chosen from the lineup could be convicted when they are innocent.  

procedure in which a series of photographs are shown sequentially to a witness for the purpose of determining if he/she can identify the perpetrator of a crime.  

One practice is that as each photo is shown to a witness, he/she must make a decision about whether the person is the suspectbefore viewing the next photo.  The second practice is to allow them to view all photos sequantially beofreany potential identification is made.

At a mininum, a photo lineup consists of six photos  - one is the suspect, five are "fillers"

Fillers are photographs of the same sex,  quality, size, shape and type of individuals who are similar in appearance (sex, age, skin color, facial hair, height, build, and other characteristics).

Problems that occur:  photos could have different backgrounds, faces could have different expressions, etc

Definition:  a systematic apporach to interviewing residents, merchants, and others who were in the immediate vicinity of a crime and may have useful information

this is a fundamental aspet of most investigations

investigator contacts residents, merchants, and others in the immediate vacinity in regards to the crime that was committed.  

an excellent tool to use when there is a large outdoor scene with no significant features or landmarks.

has been used to record where artifacts are found on an archaeological site.

typically the grid is laid out be 3 meters (10 feet).  Some can be as large as 30 feet

laying out and marking can be time consuming, but it is useful.  

definition: some people take this to mean "following" but in reality it is the continued observance of people, places and things to obtain information of investigative significance.  Most of the time it is covert, but sometimes they make it obvious in hopes that the suspect will make a mistake.  

Broken down in two types: physical (personally done by one or more members of the surveillence team) and technical (the use of various advanced technologies including: automatice vehicle tracking, pinhole cameras, acoustic/ultrasonic/thermal imaging, microphones, radio frequency bug and wire taps.

The Purpose of Survellience: establishing the existence of a crime, obtining probable cause for a search warrant aplication, apprehending suspects as they commit a crime, identifying the associates of criminals and the places they visit frequently, determining the relability of witnesses/informants, providing protection for undercover officers and informants, locating people/places/things, gathering intelligence on the activities of illegal groups and gangs, preventing a crime by signaling police awareness of specific subjects.

Planning and Preparing for Surveillance opperations:  

Department policies and applicable legal guidelines drive how the survellience is conductd.  In smaller agencies, investigators may have to do their own.  In larger ones, there will be a unit with a title such as technological services to whom the work is "farmed out" or assigned.  Planning the intelligence means making sure that the appropriate equiptment is available and security measures are reviewed.  All members of the team should be carefully briefed on such factors 

Termination of Surveillance Operations:

There must be a periodic evaluation of whether a surveillance should be continued or terminated (have other cases arisen in which the use of surveillance is a better allocation of resources, is the operation providing important on-going intelligence and information, does the continuation of the usrveillance outweigh the increased risk of detection, can other investigative techniques or technical surveillance do the job at least as effectiveky, are there indicators that suggest threats to the team's safety)

traffic citations can link suspects to the vehicles they register and drive, as well as those to which they may have access.  

Access to the vehicles of others usually denotes a special relationship and may help identify girlfriends/boyfriends, criminal associates, relatives, operators of a specific business.

Can also help to pinpoint where the operator was at during specific times of the day.  FIR cards are aslo written during traffic stops

may help to answer many of the investigator's initial questions:

- how, when, and where was the crime committed, including a chronological description of the events

- the victims identity and if appropriate, her medical condition and statement

- the number of suspects, if any are in custody, whether they are in jail ot a hospital, and their descriptions or identities

- whether composite sketches of suspects at large have been orepared and distributed

- the words spoken by sispects during the commission of the crime, spontaneous statments made by them to the arresting officer

- the identities and statements of witnesses abd any conditions noted, such as degree of drinking or appearance of having been using drugs

- the nature and value of the property stolen

- the types of physical evidence seized 

- description of any vehicles involved or a copy of an impound report for vehicles seized.

created when a subject is in-processed at a jail.

Booking report is often computer generated and may have an incident report intergrated into it as well as a color photo, fingerprints, decription of subjects health and medications, his/her mantal state, medical treatment while in custody, a full decription of the suspect, employment history, home address, alaises used, personal belonging on them at time of arrest.

driven by the needs of the client or end-user who may be the commander of the task force working on a serial murder case or the supervisor of an investigation unit trying to find a pattern in a string of violent crimes.  It is the end-user who specifies the types of information he/she wants, and it is the responsibility of the intelligence unity to make sure that the end-user understands both the possibilities and the kimitiations of the intelligence process and its techniques.

Planning and Direction - are both the beginning and the end of the intelligence cycle.  They are at the beginning because they involve identifying a focus and specific data.  Collection procedures, processing, analysis and dissemination requirements

Collecting - gathering and managing raw data, which is then analyzed to produce the finished product.  Sources of Information include (not limited to): agency-generated surces such as incident reports (crime reports), supplemental reports, fiels interview cards, traffic citations, informant records, criminal histories

Processing - how raw information from all sources is converted into a form which can be used by anaysts.

Analysis and production - how the conversion of the data which has been processes is translated into the finished intelligence product

Dissemination - is the dissemination of the finished intelligence report back to the end-user who requested it.

is the process of using systematic analytical methods to aquore timely and pertinent information on crime patterns and trend correlations

Trends:  general tendencies in te occurance of a crime across large geographic areas over extended periods of time.  They arise when areas become more conducive or les conducive to a particular crime(s).  Trends can be associated with with shifts in demography (ex: as a neighborhood ages, it residents may be seen as soft targets for uggings and home-invasion robberies).  Trends can also stem form the creation of new targets (presence of a new shopping mall).

Patterns:  crime committed repeatedly over a short period of time, sometimes, but not always by the same offender.  Ex: outside a resturant, females are having their purses snatched.

Series:  the same type of crime is committed over a short period of time, most likely by the same offender.  Ex: gated community of 73 houses, 6 burglaries occur in 9 days.

Sprees:  same type of offense is comitted at almost the same time by the same offender(s).  Ex: Vandalization of cars by a group of kids who spray paint license plates while walking through a neighborhood.  

Hot Spots: location where various crimes are committed on a regular basis, usually by different perpitrators. Ex: bar where underage drinkers are served, there are numerous fights, user-level drugs, prostitution.

too often criminal profilers promise too much and obtain too little.

also referred to as offender profiling and psychological profiling.

It is the process of studying all available information related to a crime and developing a psychological portrait of the unknown offender.  

Dissemination of general-interest information; wanted persons, stolen vehicles, etc

provide profiling services to other law-enforcement agencies.  

Profiling methods focus on the four factors:

- antecedent (the profiler tries to understand the offender's mindset)

- method (although offenders may vary in how they commit a crime, often there is a pattern to it) 

- disposal (what the offender does to the victim after the offense may form part of a odus operandi or suggest things about the offender)

- post-offense behavior (there may be no observable post-offense behavior, may contact news or media to tip them off)

nonprofit professional society of more than 400 crime laboratory directors, managers, and supervisors in the United States and 17 other countries who have backgrounds as biologists, chemists, document examiners, physicists, toxicologists, and law-enforcement officers.

devoted to the improvement of crime laboratory operations through sound management practices.  Purpose is to foster common professional interests, management practices, information, and communication among its members and to promote, encourage, and maintain the highest standards of practice for crime laboratories

national-investigation support database, developed by the FBI, is called the Combined DNA Index System.

used in the national, state, and local index system networks to link typing results from unresolved crimes with cases in multiple jurisdictions or persons convicted of offenses specified in the data-banking laws passed by the jurisdictions

one of the branches of forensic science

deals with the study of physical evidence related to a crime. From such study, a crime may be reconstructed.  

"Criminalistics is an occupation that has all of the responsibilities of medicine, the intricacy of the law and the universatility of science.

the effectiveness of crime labs and the services performed are measured by:

- quality (cleanliness, no cross contamination)

- proximity (how close you are to the crime labs)

- timeliness (how long did it take)

For the most part Validity and reliability are established.  As a reuslt of DNA testing, traditional blood testing ans saliva testing have been rendered obsolete.  

DNA consists of molecules that carry the body's genetic information and establish each person as separate and distinct. DNA can be extracted and processed from blood, tissue, spermatozoa, bone marrow, hair roots, saliva, skin cells, urine, feces, a host of biological specimens, which may be found at crime scenes.  

Samples of DNA can be easily contaminiated and need to be handled with care and caution. 

Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) - takes small samples of DNA and reproduces asmany copies as are needed for adequate analysis.

Short Tandem Repeats (STRs) - which are even smaller pieces of the DNA helix (ladder), can be reporduced using PCR to generate multiple copies in an instrument called thermocycle.

With the PCR-STR process, it takes abour 24 hours to extract DNA from an evidentary sample and only 2-3 hours to type the DNA using automation.  WOrks well on degrated samples and on analysis of Old samples.

fingerprints were classified, filed, searched according to this system.

Searches of latent fingerprints collected from crime scenes against a Henry System file have been so labor intensive and unproductive that some jurisdictions don't even attempt them.

Automated Fingerprint Identification System - a computerized system, maintained by the FBI, that stores and compares millions of fingerprints and is used to find matches for identification purposes. AFIS allows law-enforcement agencies to conduct comparisons of applicant and suspect fingerprints with literally thousands or millions of file prints in a matter of minutes.  The heart of the AFIS technology is the ability of the computer equiptment to scan and digitize fingerprints by reading spacing and ridge patterns and translating them into the appropriate computer language coding.  

Integrated Automatic Fingerprint Identification System - maintained by the FBI, a national online fingerprint and criminal history database with identification and response capabilities; may be accessed by local law enforment agencies

National Integrated Ballistoc Information Network - joint program between the FBI and ATF; integrated all the elements of Ceasefire and Brasscatcher and Drugfire.

Just as each fingerprint is different, each firearm leaves unique identifiable characteristics on expanded ammunition.  Comapres images of ballistic evidence, both projectiles and casings, obtained from crime scenes and recovered firearms.  

endomotology is the study of insects and forensic endomoltology is the study of insects associated with a dead body, ehich is used to determine the elapsed time since death.

Forensic endomotoligists can also tell the investigators whether the body has been moved from one site to another.

of the 4 responisibilities below, #1 is the main, most important function of the Coroner

1.  establish cause of death: investigate all sudden (SID), unexplained, or unnatural deaths; to confirm identity of deceased; 

2.  to notify next of kin 

3.  to secure property until NOK is notified to operate and manage the “indigent program”: abandoned/unclaimed bodies; unidentified bodies; all bodies in the indigent program are cremated (if religious or cultural objections, body is buried); confirmed verterans may be sent to VA cemetery; all cremations are buried

3.  by law the Coroner must perform autopsies on the following: autopsies “requested” by the family; CAL OSHA request of an industrial accident; all other autopsies are at the discretion of the Coroner; to assist law enforcement, the Coroner autopsies most Homicide cases.

However, homicide cases are not a legal requirement

the decrease in body temperature  - inaccurate way of determining time of death due to different whether conditions

Some factors that affect the rate of cooling:

- the size of the body: heavier the body, the slower the cooling process

- clothing and coverings:  insulate the body from the environment and therefore cooling is slower

- movement and humidity of the air: air movement accelerates cooling by promoting convection and even the slightest sustained air movement is significant.  Cooling of the body is said to be more rapid in a humid rather than dry atmosphere, becuase moist air is a better conductor of heat.

- immersion in water:  cools more rapidily in water than in air

after death, the muscles of the body initially become flacid.  With in 1-3 hours they become increasingly rigid and the joints freeze.  

muscles all start to become stiff at the same time, but some will be less frozen than others at times due to the size of the muscles, smaller muscles freeze up quicker.  

a redish purplish coloration in dependent areas of the body due to accumulation of blood in the small vessels of the dependent areas secondary to gravity.

Often misinterpreted as brusing.

when a bullet strikes a body, the skin is first pushed in and then perforated while in the stretched state.  The skin then returns to its origional postition.  The entry wound is typically smaller than the diameter of the bullet.

contact bullet wound is mafe when the muzzle of the weapon is pressed against the body when the shot is fired.

more commonly refered to as cutting wounds.

is inflicted with a sharp-edged instrument such as a knife or a razor.

outter edges of cut are thinner than the middle.