Criminal Suspicion: Policy, Psychology, and Practice

• In Event: Police Decision-Making

Abstract

Police officers make proactive decisions to detain civilians under conditions of uncertainty, limited information, and risk. The accuracy of these decisions has important implications for public safety and perceptions of legitimacy. The laws, policies, and trainings that address proactive policing rely on the notion of suspicion, which is only vaguely defined as a legal and psychological construct, and we know very little about the effect of suspicion on judgment and decision making. Defining and measuring the psychological experience of suspicion is the first step in understanding how it affects the accuracy of policing decisions. This paper presents psychometric analyses of survey data that identify the important dimensions of trait (dispositional) and state (situational) suspicion, and preliminary instruments that measure both constructs. Initial findings suggest that suspicion is a multidimensional cognitive construct, typically associated with negative experiences and a high degree of uncertainty. The individual dimensions of suspicion may vary in their effects on judgments and decisions. The paper concludes with potential applications to experimental and modeling work studying the cues that inform state suspicion, judgments of criminality, and subsequent accuracy and biases in policing decisions.

Author

• Amanda Charbonneau, University of California, Berkeley