Law Enforcement Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words - 2

Law Enforcement - Assignment Example tion team, follow-up investigation team, all can make several common mistakes or psychological pitfalls can be there that can result in erroneous criminal investigation. These common error and psychological pitfalls must be known beforehand in order to avoid them while conducting an investigation. After crime detection, the preliminary investigating officer has to conduct a thorough preliminary investigation. In order to investigate, he has to try to locate and identity the perpetrator of the crime. This location and identification requires interviewing of eyewitnesses in order to obtain information from them (Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence, & United States of America, 1999). The first and foremost common error that an investigating officer can make is asking an eyewitness leading questions that can make him or her inform what he/she has not witnessed. The investigating officer should ask open-ended questions from the eyewitnesses and keep them separated if they are more than one, as one’s account can affect the other’s account. Witnesses should be instructed to â€Å"avoid discussing details of the accident with other potential witnesses† (Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence, & United States of America, 1999, p. 16). The inve stigators should allow the eyewitnesses to explain the happening as elaborative as they can and in the description phase, the investigators as interviewers should not interrupt the interviewees or try to redirect them (Day & Marion, 2012). In addition to that, the investigators make another mistake while investigating eyewitnesses. They give unintentional signals with their body language, speaking tone, facial gestures, and other cues to the eyewitnesses that can influence the validity of the eyewitness evidence (Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence, & United States of America, 1999). Day and Marion (2012) inform that any ‘fidgety behavior’ depicted by investigating officer can cause â€Å"fidgety