Crime Scene Analysis & Criminal Profiling Seminar

Forensic Solutions and the Academy of Behavioral Profiling are pleased to sponsor the following two day training event in conjunction with the Elgin Community College. College credit is available for ECC students.

This is a two (2) day session where students learn theory and practice through the structured examination of case study material. The first day will involve the theory and practice of an holistic approach to crime reconstruction. The second day will involve the theory and practice of crime scene analysis. Each day will culminate in group work with actual case material.

This workshop is open to the public, and is strongly recommended for students and professionals who are working or studying in areas related to:

• Criminology

• Criminal Investigation

• Criminal Justice

• Forensic Nursing

• Forensic Science

• Law Enforcement

• Legal studies

• Mental Health/ Counseling

• Psychology

• Sociology

• Women's studies

• Victimology

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LOCATION

Elgin Community College
ATC Auditorium
1700 Spartan Dr.
Elgin, Illinois 60134

SEMINAR DATES & TIMES
April 8-9, 2011; 9:00AM - 4:40PM

REGISTRATION COSTS
ECC Students: $30 USD
Non-ECC Students: $50 USD
Non-Student/ Public: $100 USD

ECC STUDENTS

ECC students can concurrently enroll in PSY220.101 for course credit. See http://accessecc.elgin.edu, or contact Dr. Shawn Mikulay for more information.

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CONTACTS

Brent E. Turvey, MS
bturvey@forensic-science.com
907-738-5121

Shawn Mikulay, PhD
smikulay@elgin.edu
847-214-7963

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INSTRUCTORS

Brent E. Turvey, MS
Forensic Scientist & Criminal Profiler

Brent E. Turvey holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, with an emphasis on Forensic Psychology, and an additional Bachelor of Science in History. He went on to receive his Masters of Science in Forensic Science after studying at the University of New Haven, in West Haven, Connecticut.

Since graduating in 1996, Brent has consulted with many government agencies, law enforcement agencies, and private attorneys in the United States, Australia, China, Canada, Barbados, Korea and Scotland on a range of rapes, homicides, and serial/ multiple rape/ death cases, as a forensic scientist and criminal profiler. This includes cases under investigation, as well as those going to trial. He has also been court qualified as a forensic expert in the areas of criminal profiling, forensic science, victimology, and crime reconstruction, providing expert examinations and testimony for the last 15 years.

He is the author of Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Ed. (1999, 2002, 2008, 2011); and co-author of Rape Investigation Handbook, 1st and 2nd Ed. (2004, 2011), Crime Reconstruction, 1st and 2nd Ed. (2006, 2011), and Forensic Victimology (2009) - all with Elsevier Science. For a complete list of titles, see Amazon.com.

Brent is currently a full partner, Forensic Scientist, Criminal Profiler, and Instructor with Forensic Solutions, LLC, as well as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology and Justice Studies at Oklahoma City University. He is also the Secretary of the Academy of Behavioral Profiling, as well as a member of their board of directors.

Shawn Mikulay, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychology
Vice President, Academy of Behavioral Profiling

Shawn Mikulay received his BA, MA, and PhD in Psychology, and his MS in Industrial Management from Northern Illinois University. His published research is concentrated in the ara of employee deviance. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at Elgin Community College, and teaches courses in experimental, developmental, social, introductory, and forensic psychology, as well as human sexuality.

He is currently serving as the Vice President of the Academy of Behavioral Profiling.

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REGISTRATION

Those interested in registering for this workshop may pay by check, money order, Visa, MC, or Discover.

Check or Money Order
Make all checks or international money orders payable to Forensic Solutions, LLC in US Dollars. Also, provide your name, employment/ student information, and contact information including phone and email so that we can contact you and send updates.

Mail to:
ECC Seminar c/o
Forensic Solutions, LLC
P.O. Box 2175
Sitka, Alaska 99835

Visa/ MC
Click on the appropriate link below.

ECC Students: $30 USD	REGISTER NOW!
Non-ECC Students: $50 USD	REGISTER NOW!
Non-Student/ Public: $100 USD	REGISTER NOW!

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Web Page: http://www.forensic-science.com/seminar_2011.html

ABP CONFERENCE & PROFILING WORKSHOP - 2010

The 11th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Behavioral Profiling (ABP) will be hosted this year by Owens Community College in Toledo, Ohio on August 7th & 8th, 2010. Open to the public, thee meeting is a conference where members present papers regarding current cases and research, followed by a two day Criminal Profiling Workshop (Aug. 9-10, 2010).

Since its inception in 1999, the ABP has grown to almost 200 international members with diverse student and professional backgrounds. This includes forensic psychology, forensic psychiatry, criminal investigations, criminology, and forensic science. The membership is unified by their forensic work, teaching and scholarly research related to crime, criminals, and forensic examinations.

The schedule of presentations at this years meeting, which is open to the public, includes lectures on the subjects of criminal profiling, behavioral analysis, investigative strategy, crime reconstruction, false confessions, serial rape, sexual homicide, and victimology.

Those interested in attending should visit the ABP's website at www.profiling.org, or contact Dr. Stan Crowder at scrowder@kennesaw.edu. All are welcome.

Links:

1. http://www.profiling.org/abp_meeting2010.html

2. http://www.forensic-science.com/seminar_2010.html

Criminal Profilers Meet at Grossmont College

The Tenth Annual Meeting of the Academy of Behavioral Profiling (ABP) will be held this year at Grossmont College in El Cajon, California on August 8th & 9th.

"Our first meeting was in Monterey, back in 1999," says Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist and criminal profiler in private practice, as well as the Secretary of the ABP. "We got a lot accomplished in that first year, including uniform terminology, a strong code of ethics and written practice standards. All of these have been published and regularly updated in the textbookCriminal Profiling, in its third edition now, which our more senior practicing members have contributed to over the years."

Since its inception in 1999, the ABP has grown to over 150 international members with diverse professional backgrounds such as forensic psychology, forensic psychiatry, criminal investigations, criminology, and forensic science. They are all bound together by their work in relation to crime, criminals, and forensic examinations.

The upcoming meeting at Grossmont College promises to be among the most important, as changes are coming. "The profiling discipline has matured," explains current ABP President,Dr. Wayne Petherick, a forensic criminologist and professor of criminology at Bond University in Gold Coast, Australia. "There are many different kinds of criminological assessments performed by our members, because the knowledge and skills developed for profiling can be used in other forensic examinations. The ABP is evolving to keep up with those kinds of advancements."

"For our members the annual meeting is a chance for students and professionals to get together, share ideas, and remain current with methods and developments in recent cases," states Michael McGrath, MD, a forensic psychiatrist and past President of the ABP, currently serving as its Ethics Chair. "For the other professionals and even the general public, it is an opportunity to learn about forensic casework from people who are actually doing it and know what they are talking about. There are a lot of misconceptions out there."

The schedule of presentations at this years meeting, which is open to the public, includes lectures on the subjects of forensic criminology, criminal profiling, homicide solvability, motivations of law enforcement offenders, forensic victimology, ethics, and staged crime scenes.

Those interested in attending should visit the ABP's website at www.profiling.org, or contactDr. Stan Crowder at scrowder@kennesaw.edu.

FALSE REPORTER HAS HISTORY

Law enforcement investigators have a hard job, no doubt about it. They are required to make difficult decisions under stressful situations in a very short period of time which can have grave consequences. So there will be mistakes. One way reduce the number of those mistakes is by ensuring that decisions are as informed as possible. 

To that end, prior to responding to any call, whether it is a domestic disturbance or a complaint of sexual assault, a preliminary assessment of the actors involved is necessary. It involves little more than a quick database search for wants, warrants, and criminal convictions - much like is done during an average traffic stop. This simple act can better inform decisions and determinations that must be made at the scene. This includes, but is not limited to: who was more likely the aggressor in a domestic disturbance by virtue of history; who has a history of being armed; who has a history of being under the influence of a controlled substance; and who might have a history of falsely reporting crime.

Problems caused by the failure to investigate and establish the history of those involved in criminal complaints, on both sides, are discussed throughout Forensic Victimology (2008; p.293):

False reporters span all ages, all walks of life, and are capable of staging both injuries and evidence to support their claims. A thorough investigation of the evidence has traditionally been the best way to reveal the false reporter, who is more likely to confess when confronted with logical inconsistencies in his or her statements and behavior. Unfortunately, law enforcement resources are drained away from actual victims by such cases. Innocent citizens are exposed to the possibility of false accusations and damage to their personal and professional lives. Legitimate victims of sexual assault are exposed to the possibility of encountering overtaxed law enforcement resources that are inadequate to the task of investigating their cases thoroughly or competently. Building owners, private companies, and insurance companies are exposed to the threat of costly liability lawsuits. As stated in Gross (1924, 14): "Not only must the self-made victim be exposed, but innocent people who may be suspected must be protected."

A recent example illustrates the kind of problems that can averted by delaying action for just a few moments while stories are checked out and backgrounds are made clear. In involves Elisa LaCroix, a false reporter with a history.

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Child's mother faces charges for making false report

Attorney calls it a spur-of-the-moment plan that grew out of control.

By JULIA O'MALLEY

jomalley@adn.com

March 2nd, 2009

Elisa LaCroix appeared in court Monday on charges related to what police say was the staged abduction of her 3-week-old son Saturday.

LaCroix is charged with making a false report -- a misdemeanor -- as well as violating probation on a 2006 burglary conviction. She's also facing charges for faking a sexual assault in January.

She blamed the rape and, at one point, the abduction on an ex-boyfriend, prosecutors say. He was later cleared in both cases.

Each charge carries the possibility of up to a year in prison, up to a $10,000 fine and up to 10 years of probation, according to her attorney, Rex Butler. Her bail was set at $5,000, he said.

LaCroix has two children, including the 3-week-old, and both are in the custody of a family member, Butler said.

"That is what she wanted," Butler said.

He said she is also in counseling.

The abduction report led law enforcement to issue the state's first Amber Alert for a missing child overnight Saturday. The charges against her say that investigators later discovered that LaCroix handed her infant out a bedroom window to a friend because she was worried that her husband, who is due to deploy to Afghanistan, would try to take custody of him. The friend didn't know that she was part of a scheme and was not charged.

In a live interview on KTUU Channel 2 Monday evening, Butler said LaCroix, desperate to keep custody of her son, made a spur-of-the-moment plan that got out of hand. He called her a victim.

"The public doesn't know the whole story," he said.

Attempts to reach LaCroix's husband, Kaid LaCroix, on Monday were not successful.

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Brent E.Turvey, MS, also author of Criminal Profiling, 3rd Ed. with Elsevier Science (2008), can be reached at bturvey@forensic-science.com.

FORENSIC VICTIMOLOGY TEXT: VICTIM STUDY TOO POLITICAL; INVESTIGATIVE AND LEGAL OUTCOMES COMPROMISED

PRESS RELEASE - Forensic Solutions, LLC

Victims of violent crime are too often studied as stereotypical groups rather than as complex individuals. Investigators are too often pressured to accept or question victim statements based on emotional and political considerations. And worse, the justice system treats many victims as mere witnesses for the prosecution, rating their character with subjective moral standards, rather than perceiving them as real people who have suffered harm and need help. The result is less informed research, less informed investigations, and less informed legal outcomes. So argues the new textbook Forensic Victimology (Elsevier Science, 2009) coauthored by forensic scientist and criminal profiler Brent Turvey of Alaska, and Wayne Petherick, PhD, an Associate Professor of Criminology at Bond University on the Gold Coast, Australia.

In part, the current state of academic affairs has to do with the way that different victim groups are regarded by the police and courts, and then researched and taught by theoretical criminologists. There is a tendency to avoid asking tough questions of culturally sympathetic victims, such as those who have been raped, and a desire to punish others who may be regarded as immoral or complicit, such as drug addicts and prostitutes, Dr. Petherick explains.

“Victimology, which is a sub-discipline of criminology, is meant to be the scientific study of victims. But it is taught at university almost exclusively through a narrow lens that involves feminist and restorative perspectives bundled with less than reliable victim crime data,” states Dr. Petherick. “Unfortunately, too many lecturers are there to push a particular agenda or ideology when neutrality is what’s needed. That tends to put a lot of our best students off. It’s at best naive and at worst politicized. This needs to change.”

Turvey agrees. “Science is skeptical. It asks questions. And it assumes nothing. Lose the freedom to doubt and we lose our ability to understand problems, let alone solve them,” he explains.

Turvey, a court qualified forensic expert who has worked rape and homicide cases for law enforcement and attorneys since the mid 1990s, sees the current landscape of victimology as one overpopulated with advocates – some by job title and some by way of personal philosophy. “It seems as though much of victimology has become the property of those with social and even political agendas. There is more to victimology than that – substantially more.”

For Turvey and those like him, victim study is not about broad or obscure theory; it is applied and specific – a necessary component of investigating violent crime. “My job is to figure out what happened and why. That means getting the facts. And that means asking tough questions to victims and about victims in every case – no matter what. My experience has been that politics and personal beliefs immediately get in the way of that.”

For more than ten years, Petherick and Turvey have collaborated on casework and teaching projects in both the United States and Australia. In their work, they have repeatedly been confronted by the same types of problems with respect to victims of crime: some witnesses lie about victims, some victims lie about what happened to them, and some people lie about being victims. And that’s when victim evidence is collected at all. In the current culture, the way that victims are investigated and studied, it is difficult to address this without offending someone – whether it be the victim, a victim’s advocate, an investigator, an attorney, or a judge.

They came to realize that the solution to these problems was already there, if buried beneath competing agendas. The solution was to reboot victimology as a truly scientific study with investigative and forensic implications.

Forensic Victimology as a field is defined by the authors as the scientific study of victims for the purposes of addressing investigative and forensic issues. It involves the skeptical investigation of facts and a thorough examination of the evidence. Forensic victimology, explains Turvey, provides a scientific balance against the idealization or demonization of victims, a filter for deception and false reporting, and the means for identifying a threshold of relevance for victim information and opinions already at work in the criminal justice system.

They write: “the forensic victimologist is best conceived as an objective, dispassionate, and above all scientific examiner. They are critical and skeptical, and they put the establishment of fact before politics or any other consideration. To that end, they take nothing for granted, look for corroboration of any alleged victim’s statements, seek out collateral sources of information, and investigate alternate or contributing motives for victim behavior. Most importantly, the forensic victimologist is barred from assuming that alleged victims must have been victimized. For their purposes, victimity must be established unequivocally and may not be asserted simply for ideological purposes. They investigate as scientists, they report as educators, and they understand the gravity of their eventual courtroom testimony.”

The result of their work and research is a colloborative textbook, Forensic Victimology, published in October of 2008 by Elsevier Science out of San Diego, California, with chapters contributed by a range of professionals whose work involves interpreting victim evidence. “It gives students basic methodology, and professional victimologists the permission to think, teach, and act like scientists,” explains Turvey. Dr. Petherick goes further, arguing “It moves victimology from the theoretical study of victim groups through the lens of radical agendas to an applied scientific discipline that helps solve crime and resolve legal questions. It is where criminology needs to be.”

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Brent E.Turvey, MS, also author of Criminal Profiling, 3rd Ed. with Elsevier Science (2008), can be reached at bturvey@forensic-science.com.

Wayne A. Petherick, PhD, also author of Serial Crime with Elsevier Science (2005), can be reached at wpetheri@staff.bond.edu.au.