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Effective Homicide Investigations

Investigator Beliefs Of Homicide Crime Scene Characteristics

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Homicide investigators rely on a plethora of sources to solve a case, including their own beliefs and intuitions. We discuss a variety of these beliefs and explore their veracity using a novel approach, coding cases from the documentary television show, Forensic Files. Our results indicate that most of these beliefs are unsupported. However, some beliefs may be predictive. Specifically, a body that was wrapped or placed in a container was indicative that the body had been transported. In addition, finding the victim nude was predictive of rape. We discuss the problems of following inaccurate beliefs, and the potential use of the accurate beliefs we identified.

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Missing White Woman Syndrome: An Empirical Analysis of Race and Gender Disparities in Online News Coverage of Missing Persons

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INTRODUCTION

On Sunday morning, November 3, 2013, Aaron Hubbard went to church. It was the last time his family would see him alive. A few hours later, Chicago police received a report that Hubbard had been kidnapped. According to witnesses, Hubbard, a seventeen-year-old high school student, was attacked and thrown into a truck that quickly drove away. After eight days of searching, police found Hubbard’s decomposing body in an abandoned building not far from where the abduction had occurred. A handful of short news stories documented the story in Hubbard’s hometown of Chicago, but the case received no coverage on a regional or national scale. Three months earlier, in August, California native Hannah Anderson disappeared, triggering a massive manhunt for her and her alleged kidnapper. The incident sparked a media firestorm, with news agencies across the country covering the sixteen-year-old’s disappearance. Local and national media outlets tracked the investigation, with CNN.com alone .

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Promoting Effective Homicide Investigations

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INTRODUCTION

CALL FOR ACTION

In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) hosted two conferences addressing violent crime: the “Promoting Effective Homicide Investigations” (May 25 and 26) and the “National Violent Crime Sum- mit” (August 30). Both were instrumental in understanding violent crime in the United States, as well as national and local initiatives to reduce it.1 The primary goal of this document is to improve homicide investigations by exploring law enforcement agency practices and examining relatively new procedures that may lead to more effective investigations. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) report of 2005 crime data showed a 2.4 percent nationwide increase in homicides from 2004.The FBI’s preliminary numbers for 2006 indicate a continued upward trend in homicides in cities across the nation. For example, during the period 2004 to 2006, homicides increased by 38 percent in Cleveland. Other cities with significant increases in homicides in that period include Cincinnati (41 percent), Houston (37 percent), Las Vegas (16 percent),

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Missing White Woman Syndrome How Media Framing Affects Viewers’ Emotions

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Abstract

In this experiment, the study of missing white woman syndrome is extended to video coverage to determine whether visual framing and race have an effect on the emotions of viewers. Missing white woman syndrome relates to the idea that stories about attractive, young, white females who go missing are more prevalent in the news to the exclusion of similar stories about other demographics. This study examined the relationship between race and framing effects through a factorial design experiment and posttest questionnaire. Experimental conditions compared television news stories about women of different demographics who are portrayed differently in both visual and nonvisual frames. Results showed that visual framing did affect the emotions of viewers, but the race of the missing person did not...

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