The 8 characteristics of false reports

Not all reports received by police stations are true. On some occasions, complainants file this type of report with the intention of receiving some type of benefit by reporting that they have been victims of robbery or theft.

However, the extensive experience of the police coupled with the existence of certain programs algorithms that analyze the language of this type of complaint can detect whether the complainant has lied or not.

Surprising as it may sound, false reports are detectable, something that should scare anyone who wants to mislead officers. Next we are going to discover what are the characteristics of false reports, especially as regards language. Do not stop reading if you want to find out!

• Related article: "The 12 types of language (and their characteristics)"

There are keys to detecting false reports

It is almost common sense that not all complaints filed at the police station or in court are true. A percentage of them are false reports, something that It can be especially common for crimes such as theft, robbery and anything that involves some kind of short-term economic gain

. There are also false reports related to incidents that, if reported, may lead to the collection of an insurance policy.

Filing a false complaint is, legally, the act of accusing a person through a complaint for having committed an alleged crime before the corresponding authority, knowing that its content is false or that it is known that the story expressed in it does not correspond to the truth. Complaints, whether true or false, always bring with them the possibility of socially damaging the person reported, which is why if you are the victim of a false report it is always advisable to report this crime.

That there are false reports is a reality, but what are the characteristics of false reports? What characterizes a complaint so that it is revealed as having false content? Finding out if a complaint is false or not may seem like an exercise in fortune telling, but the truth is that it is not as difficult as you might think. In fact, we could say that those who lie when filing a complaint use their own language, a series of expressions and grammatical constructions that give them away.

Despite what most may believe, the truth is that people lie in a similar way. When we are in front of a policeman, our account of how the robbery that we have invented happened is almost always the same. Except for the stolen object, the rest remains stable: ambiguity, day on which the events occurred unclear and it was not possible to see who stole from us.

These are just some of the characteristics of false reports, aspects that have been algorithmically addressed through programs such as the one proposed by Miguel Camacho's group in 2018 called VeriPol, a powerful tool that can provide reliable data to establish whether the report of the whistleblower is true or not. This program, together with the experience of police officers versed in years and years detecting the lies of those who interpose false reports, a series of common characteristics have been found in false reports concerning theft and thefts.

• You may be interested in: "Differences between Criminal Psychology and Forensic Psychology"

Characteristics of false reports

Most false reports have patterns in their language that are more or less obvious to the expert police officer, and more so to a sophisticated mathematical program.

Several years detecting whether a complaint is true or not is no longer a mystery, and thanks to the development of powerful grammar analysis programs, syntax and semantics of the robbery complaints it is possible to know how true is the story that the complainant has given us. Proof of this is that expert police officers detect almost 75% of false reports, and the aforementioned program reaches 91%.

1. Temporal ambiguity

One of those predictors that someone is lying when explaining what happened is the word "day." This word appears in false reports not because the robberies were in broad daylight, but because the whistleblower uses very unspecific time expressions such as "a few days ago", "one day", "it will be a couple of days days".

When you are the victim of a real crime, it is normal to clearly remember on which specific day it happened, something that is evidenced in the true complaints with more specific time expressions such as "yesterday", "Thursday", "Monday morning"... The ambiguity of when the events occurred is a characteristic pattern of false reports.

• Related article: "Types of memory: how does the human brain store memories?"

2. Robbery from behind

Another expression that usually appears in this type of complaint is that the "robbery occurred from behind" and the like. The complainant was the victim of a crime from behind, in the form of tugging his bag or opening his backpack, without having time to see him.

Fake thefts often happen from behind because it saves the whistleblower from having to give details, saying that he could not see anything else of who robbed him because he did not have time for anything. Words like "jerk", "shoulder", "backpack", "back" can serve as red flags.

3. Well covered thief

In false reports of theft and robbery, the offender has all the earmarks of the terrible bad guy in a movie. It is usual that he is referred to as a person who wore a helmet, and was dressed in black, because the bad guys always wear black. In this type of complaint, the thief is usually well covered, as if he were going to rob a bank or were taken out of the distribution of La Casa de Papel.

• Related article: "Lawrence Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development"

4. Focused on the object

Regardless of what has been stolen from us, being a victim of a crime is a traumatic experience that we inevitably remember as a bad drink. If something of value has been stolen from us, it is clear that we are going to remember it, but the act itself is remembered in a particularly intense way.

The descriptions in the false reports do not focus on the facts, but on the object. The most frequently mentioned words in this type of complaint have to do directly with the economic value of the stolen object, such as "insurance", "company" and "contract".

In addition, it often happens that the brand of the stolen device is expensive, something that can especially attract attention if it is seen that the complainant has a rather low purchasing power. That is why words like "Apple" or "iPhone" are found.

• You may be interested in: "The 15 types of lies and their characteristics"

5. Distance from the complainant's house

One of the most curious characteristics of false reports is that the closer it has occurred to the complainant's home is most likely true, except that it happened in the home itself.

A complaint in which it is specified that the events occurred near the victim's home, with expressions such as “in the home portal”, is more likely to be true.

Instead, those who file false reports tend to locate the facts far from their home, away from your acquaintances as neighbors who could confirm to the police that that person is lying.

• Related article: "The 95 best cheating phrases"

6. Syntactic and grammatical aspects

The grammatical and syntactic resources of the complaint can also indicate whether or not it is false.. It seems that the personal and demonstrative pronouns (I, he, they, that, that ...) and even the verbs “ser” and “estar” appear in greater proportion in the true complaints. In the false ones, on the other hand, the complainants are not very inclined to specify using specific pronouns such as "I", "he", "this", "that" ...

The syntax also gives away. Phrases introduced by the adverb "hardly" ("I could hardly see him", "I barely remember") usually indicate falsehood. A high number of denials are also related to lying, with phrases such as "I cannot give more information", "I have not received injuries", "I could not see him", "I could not recognize him" ...

• You may be interested in: "The 9 types of social exclusion, and how they affect citizenship"

7. Background in stock

True reports focus primarily on action, while false reports focus on describing objects, which is the only thing the reporter has seen. In the true ones, words related to specific qualities and actions appear in greater proportion, like "face", "hair", "beard", "age", "man"... words that specify how it was who committed the crime and the specific situation in which the events occurred.

8. Extension of the complaint

False reports are usually shorter, although this should not be interpreted as that every concise expression of something is necessarily false. One thing is the complaints in a judicial context and another, very different, are the opinions filed on the comments page of a restaurant or hotel page. Brevity is not a feature of all lies, but it must be contextualized.

Final reflection

All these characteristic features of false reports do not in themselves constitute falsehoods. It is their combination and persistence among the total number of words that indicate the probability that the fact reported by someone is false. It should also be said that it is difficult to expose all the characteristics of false reports and, even if they are known, These are not going to save anyone from having their report not identified as false by a well-endowed police officer in the matter.

Taking into account that false reports constitute a crime and that the police have powerful tools to detect them, it is better to think twice before trying to sneak it to the agents.