A study comparing the eyewitness accuracy of police officers and citizens
Item
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Title
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A study comparing the eyewitness accuracy of police officers and citizens
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:9191b95bcdd7:10573
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identifier
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10867
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Creator
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DeCarlo, John C.,
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Contributor
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Jennifer E. Dysart
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Experimental psychology | Criminology | Eyewitness | Memory | Multiple perpetrator crime | Stress | Weapon focus
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Abstract
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Police officers are not only responsible for administering lineups and interviews where citizens' eyewitness memories are tested, they are also called upon to make arrests, write reports, prepare warrants and testify in court based on their own memories. Do police make better eyewitnesses than citizens? This study hopes to partially answer that question while contributing to the body of eyewitness research on weapon focus effect (WFE) and the new area of inquiry on trying to understand witness accuracy for multiple perpetrator crimes. This study investigates the effects of WFE and the presence of multiple perpetrators on eyewitness memory in two separate experiments. Two groups, police officers and citizens, were tested and compared in each experiment. One of the reasons that have been theorized to explain the presence of WFE is that weapons might hold a certain amount of contextual relevance or novelty that draws the attention of the observer when the weapon is present in a scene. Since police officers are commonly exposed to weapons and receive training on de-escalation of multi-person conflicts, the current study attempted to determine whether citizens and police would perform in similar or dissimilar ways to situations which might inhibit the observation and encoding of crime scene elements into memory. Two experiments were conducted to measure the arousal level of participants and assess the accuracy of police and citizen identification decisions in situations that potentially divert attention from the perpetrator in a simulated crime. Experiment 1 examined the effects of the presence of a weapon and the "weapon focus effect." The results showed that police officers tested lower on certain factors associated with stress and arousal than citizens but both police and citizens made more errors when a weapon was inferred or present. This is the first time that the inferred weapon condition has been experimentally explored. In addition, police made fewer filler identifications when the lineup target was present than when absent. Experiment 2 tested whether the presence of two culprits instead of one culprit affected identification rates. Both police and citizens experienced an increase in two factors that are associated with stress and arousal. Additionally, both police and citizens' identification accuracy was lower in the presence of two culprits; no accuracy differences were found between the police and citizen group. The results will add to the body of literature in eyewitness identification and contribute to the understanding of how stress or anxiety may or may not affect identification accuracy. In addition, it is hoped that elements of the study will be useable in police training contexts to help understand and improve the way that eyewitness evidence is processed and used by law enforcement agencies.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Criminal Justice
