All about crime: crime scenes, courtrooms and cybercrime

What happens when cybercriminals walk into a fake cybercrime shop? Researcher Asier Moneva, of the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), gets front row footage of their real behavior: confusion, trial and error, and the occasional digital meltdown. By studying these captured interactions, Asier hopes to shift cybersecurity from always reacting to actually predicting what criminals will try next. His work explores the gap between Hollywood hackers and the far messier reality, bringing science, deception, and a bit of fun to the fight against cybercrime.

The development of new techniques—and the adaptation of medical methods — for use at crime scenes to recover traces and uncover new insights about victims is a rapidly evolving field of research. Advances in technology now make it possible to turn even the smallest trace into a valuable lead for criminal investigations. At Amsterdam UMC, the Forensic Biophysics group is at the forefront of this movement, bridging medicine and forensic science. Professor Maurice Aalders works with light-based imaging and microscopy to study minimal traces. In his talk, he will explore innovative approaches to the analysis of blood spatter analysis and bruises, and methods to estimate time of death—not only in human victims of crime, but also in cases involving poached wildlife.

Every so often, society is shaken by a serious violent crime. It frequently emerges that the perpetrator is suffering from a severe psychiatric disorder. Such incidents often provoke widespread public outrage, raising questions like: why was this person free to move about in society?
In this presentation, Joke Harte will examine how criminal law addresses offenders with severe mental illnesses. She will review what scientific research tells us about the relationship between serious psychiatric disorders and violent behavior. Finally, she will discuss why it remains so difficult to predict, in individual cases, whether someone diagnosed with a major mental disorder poses a risk to society. Joke Harte is full professor at the Department of Criminology of the Faculty of Law of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In the past she worked as a researcher in the field of forensic psychiatry, including at the Pieter Baan Centre, the psychiatric observation clinic of the Ministry of Justice. Her studies predominantly focus on empirical research on the boundaries between psychiatry and criminal law.