[Ideal type and history--a critical review of applied criminology]

Applied Criminology describes an established criminological school in the German-speaking area, which was founded by Hans Göppinger and Michael Bock, criminologists at Tübingen, in the 1980s and has meanwhile published a number of comprehensive basic methodological papers. The conceptual centrepiece with interdisciplinary approach is the formation and application of concepts referring to the so-called ideal type, which has been essentially inspired by the epistemology of Max Weber. However, the result of a critical reconstruction of these fundamentals is that the claimed interdisciplinary approach comes into conflict with a second much more phenomenological approach of Applied Criminology which is unable to comply with the political implications of criminological research and thus disavows the necessary historical relationality of the ideal type concepts.

Expertise in crime scene examination: comparing search strategies of expert and novice crime scene examiners in simulated crime scenes

OBJECTIVE

The strategies of novice and expert crime scene examiners were compared in searching crime scenes.

BACKGROUND

Previous studies have demonstrated that experts frame a scene through reconstructing the likely actions of a criminal and use contextual cues to develop hypotheses that guide subsequent search for evidence.

METHOD

Novice (first-year undergraduate students of forensic sciences) and expert (experienced crime scene examiners) examined two "simulated" crime scenes. Performance was captured through a combination of concurrent verbal protocol and own-point recording, using head-mounted cameras.

RESULTS

Although both groups paid attention to the likely modus operandi of the perpetrator (in terms of possible actions taken), the novices paid more attention to individual objects, whereas the experts paid more attention to objects with "evidential value." Novices explore the scene in terms of the objects that it contains, whereas experts consider the evidence analysis that can be performed as a consequence of the examination.

CONCLUSION

The suggestion is that the novices are putting effort into detailing the scene in terms of its features, whereas the experts are putting effort into the likely actions that can be performed as a consequence of the examination.

APPLICATION

The findings have helped in developing the expertise of novice crime scene examiners and approaches to training of expertise within this population.

Explaining feast or famine in randomized field trials. Medical science and criminology compared

A feast of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in medical science and comparative famine in criminology can be explained in terms of cultural and structural factors. Of central importance is the context in which the evaluation of interventions is done and the difference in status of situational research in the two disciplines. Evaluation of medical interventions has traditionally been led by practitioner (clinical) academics. This is not the case in criminal justice, where theory has had higher status than intervention research. Medical science has advanced in, or closely associated with, university teaching hospitals, but links between criminology and criminal justice services are far more tenuous. The late development of situational crime prevention seems extraordinary from a medical perspective, as does the absence of university police schools in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. These structural and cultural factors explain concentration of expectation, resource, and RCT productivity in medical science. The Campbell Collaboration and the Academy of Experimental Criminology are forces which are reducing this polarization of feast and famine in RCTs. But unless scientific criminology is embedded in university schools which are responsible for the education and training of law, probation, and police practitioners, convergence in terms of RCTs and implementation of findings in practice seems unlikely.