Formalizing the results of the offender's personality reflection in traces of a crime: forensic aspects

The main purpose of formalizing data is the creation of a full information system that provides the possibility of organizing storage, procession and transmission of the final forensically important information needed for making a decision by a person conducting an investigation. This area is now mainly the basic one that uses the results of formalization in forensic science. For the most effective work of this information system it is proposed to create it on the basis of a relational database, which in turn imposes certain requirements to the formalization of the data entered. Of all the elements of criminological characteristics, which the information system being created is based on (hereinafter program to support the investigation), the most complex in terms of formalization is the forensic description of a personality. During preparatory work for the formalization and preparation of personal data for computer processing, we identified the following common problems that must be solved at the stage of designing the database of forensic data which is the core of the program being created. First, the formalized data must meet formal requirements of the first normalization form (1NF), which provides for separation of composite data (in the terminology of relational databases-attributes) into different rows (columns). The simplest example from the area of forensically important information is the separation of an address into its component parts (location, street, house number, apartment number, floor and so on). This requirement does not cause problems in the case of personal data and the data that can be measured, but may cause certain difficulties in the formalization of the behavioral-motor level of an offender's personality reflection. The system with the data which meet this requirement, in turn, must comply with the second and third forms of normalization (2NF and 3NF), i.e. all non-key attributes are dependent only on the key entirely, not on a part of it, and functional dependencies between them are eliminated. Secondly, information about one and the same criterion may come from different process sources and can be expressed in a variety of forms. As an example, let us take the outward manifestation of automatic movements being a characteristic of a left-handed person. In the case of witness statements obtained in the course of interrogation, and recorded in the minutes of the investigative procedure, it may be indicated by the information that the offender has caught an object thrown to him or her with the left hand. In the case of manifestation of automatic movements of left-handers in the process of breaking barriers in the form of using his or her left leg as the support leg, this will be indicated by a particular localization of footprints, recorded in the minutes of crime scene examination and its annexes (diagrams, drawings, photographic tables, videos).

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