Does watching CSI help criminals to cover up their crimes?
It’s official – watching TV crime dramas won’t actually make you a better criminal.
A new study has found that despite concerns that TV shows like Silent Witness and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation could help criminals cover up their crimes, there’s no link between watching them and the ability to get away with a crime.
In the first study of its kind, German psychologists explored whether criminals could profit from viewing crime dramas involving forensic investigations, learning from them to avoid detection.
Dr Andreas Baranowski of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz who is behind the study said the series had become very popular in recent years.
"They have raised the importance of forensic evidence in the eyes of the public – the CSI effect,” Dr Baranowski said.
“However, it has not been investigated to what extent criminals may learn about forensic evidence through these shows.
“Over many years, it was presumed that certain links in this regard exist, although there were no appropriate studies to prove this.”
Dr Baranowski and his colleagues undertook four separate investigations, including comparing crime detection rates during the years before and after the launch of the CSI series, as well as getting opinions from convicted criminals in prisons on whether such series could help when it came to escaping prosecution.
The fourth test involved re-enacting a crime with the help of a doll’s house in which 120 volunteers had to clean up the scene of a would-be murder.
The study found on the whole, there was no connection between watching forensic dramas and the ability to successfully avoid detection after committing a crime, though men performed better than women, and younger participants better than older one.
More highly educated subjects did better than their less well-educated peers and those working in technical professions, primarily men, seemed to have certain advantages when it came to covering up crimes.
Dr Baranowski said the study, published in the International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, would help dispel myths that shows that look at crime investigations could benefit those trying to cover their tracks.
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He added: “Every time something new emerges there are people who focus in one aspect and without a full and proper consideration sense possible risks and thus call for bans.
“We can now dispel certain of the myths that have been coursing through the media and other publications for the past 20 years because we are able to state with relative certainty that people who watch CSI are no better at covering their tracks than other people.”
