This article was originally published in December 2017.
A newly published paper by QUT’s Dr Angela Higginson, and Life Course Centre researchers Elizabeth Eggins and Professor Lorraine Mazerolle, appears in Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, a publication from the Australian Institute of Criminology. Their paper, ‘Police techniques for investigating serious violent crime: A systematic review’, takes a look at existing research on the effectiveness of police investigative techniques.
Using systematic review methods, Higginson, Eggins, and Mazerolle reviewed and synthesised the results of 18 experimental and quasi-experimental studies on police investigation techniques. These related to six broad crime categories of homicide, robbery, carjacking, serious assault, sexual assault, and an aggregate measure of serious violent crime.
The authors found that 10 categories of techniques across the 18 studies were effective in increasing advancement of the criminal case (offender identification, arrest, confession, case closure, or conviction). The authors highlight the limited availability of empirical research on how serious violent crime is investigated by police.
You can find their paper, here.