Criminal Psychopaths

Abstract

It is ironic that those who have the most direct contact with Psychopaths — family, relatives, friends, employers, and front-line members of social agencies and the criminal justice system, including the police — are the ones least likely to have formal exposure to the clinical concept of psychopathy and to the associated research literature. Police officers, for example, have frequent encounters with psychopaths, and although they may have a good intuitive understanding of human behavior and an ability to size up people accurately, they will often find these encounters to be perplexing, frustrating, and threatening. For these reasons, and also because of the relative ease with which many psychopaths are able to flout moral, ethical, and legal conventions, it is important that police know as much about them as possible. This chapter provides an overview of the sort of material that might be covered in police training programs.