The Boy in the Water Case: US Crime Scene Investigator Karen Smith slams NZ police..

.. over their "pathetic" investigation.

Tell us something new love... most of us who follow criminology and criminal cases in this country already know that our cops are lousy investigators, as evidenced by the complete pig's breakfast they made of the Bain and the Lundy investigations.

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/us-detect...ation-pathetic

Karen Smith, a retired American crime scene investigator, has spent more than 400 hours investigating the death of Gore toddler Lachie Jones and says the police investigation into his death was an “across the board system failure".

In an interview from her home in the United States, Smith explains why she is working on the case pro bono after being contacted by a friend from New Zealand.
"I have seen a lot of really bad police investigations in my time. I’ve made mistakes of my own, so I’m not perfect. But the lack of effort, the lack of circumspection, the lack of taking the information and going ‘maybe we got this wrong, maybe we need to look in a different direction’. I think it’s pathetic.

Smith tells Newsroom she thinks there were two forms of bias that crept into the investigation into Lachie’s death – anchoring bias and confirmation bias.

"Anchoring bias is when that first piece of information drives the rest of it without any consideration of other alternatives. Confirmation bias is when every single piece of evidence or information you find you slam that square peg into the round hole and try to make it fit into your initial thought. So I think both of those types of bias really pushed this case, to the detriment of anything to the alternative. And that is a huge problem in any investigation."

Those of us familiar with the Scott Watson case will recognize this aspect.
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via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/vJ5nor2