INVESTIGATIVE PSYCHOLOGY -- APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY TO CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION.

A new field of judicial psychology, investigative psychology has already established itself in the academic world but also in the field of judicial police. The article analyses the area of so-called criminological profiling, the methodology of investigation based on the analysis of information related to a crime. An important aspect taken into consideration is the victimological analysis, i.e., the study of the victim's characteristics and of the interactive processes that link her/him to the perpetrator during the crime. We make a comparative presentation of the two approaches, the American one - Crime Scene Analysis - and the English one, of prof. David Canter, investigative psychology, insisting on the theoretical framework of investigative psychology which is based on five fundamental hypotheses: "interpersonal coherence", that is actions committed by a criminal during a crime, no matter how bizarre or extreme, are always consistent with his psychological structure and personality, "the significance of the place and time of the crime", in other words, their choice is never accidental and reveals important objective information about the perpetrator but also the "maps of the criminal mind". Then, the hypothesis that all "criminal characteristics" of the offender can be classified into explanatory categories and subcategories, based on the type of behavior committed during the crime, the concept of "criminal career", i.e., the assessment of possible criminal activities previously carried out by the subject and their type, and, last but not least, the concept of "forensics awareness" whether the attempts to mislead and / or conceal an offense adopted by the offender during the commission of the offense are more or less sophisticated. Then, the article analyses the victim and the criminological profile. In the last chapter, we analyze whether criminal profiling has all the attributes to be considered a science, i.e., it is thus defined only and exclusively on the basis of two elements: the presence of a theoretical paradigm, a theoretical model and the falsification of its fundamental hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]