Not all complaints received by police stations are true. On some occasions, complainants file these types of reports with the intention of receiving some type of benefit by reporting that they have been victims of a robbery or theft.
However, the extensive experience of the police combined with the existence of certain algorithmic programs that analyze the language of this type of complaint can detect whether the complainant has lied or not.
As surprising as it may seem, false reports are detectable, something that should scare anyone who wants to deceive the agents. Next We are going to discover what the characteristics of false complaints are, especially when it comes to language Don’t stop reading if you want to find out!
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 complaints, something that It can be especially common for crimes such as theft, robbery, and any that involve some type of short-term economic gain There are also false reports related to incidents that, if reported, may result in the collection of an insurance policy.
Filing a false report is, legally, the act of accusing a person through a report of having committed an alleged crime before the corresponding authority, knowing that its content is false or that it is known that the story expressed therein is not true. corresponds to the truth. Complaints, whether true or false, always bring with them the possibility of socially harming the person reported, which is why if you are a victim of a false report it is always advisable to report this crime.
That there are false complaints is a reality, but what are the characteristics of false complaints? What characterizes a complaint so that it is reported as having false content? Finding out if a complaint is false or not may seem like an exercise in cartomancy, 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 police officer, our story of how the robbery that we have invented happened is almost always the same. With the exception of the stolen object, the rest remains stable: ambiguity, unclear day on which the events occurred and it was not possible to see who robbed us.
These are just some of the characteristics of false complaints, aspects that have been addressed algorithmically 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 complainant’s story is true or not. This program, together with the experience of police officers versed in years and years of detecting the lies of those who file false reports, have found a series of common characteristics in false reports concerning robberies and thefts.
Characteristics of false complaints
Most false complaints have patterns in their language that are more or less obvious to the expert police officer, and even 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 theft complaints, it is possible to know how true the story that the complainant has given us is. Proof of this is that expert police officers detect almost 75% of false complaints, and the aforementioned program reaches up to 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 complainant uses very non-specific expressions of time such as “a few days ago,” “one day,” “a couple of days ago.”
When you are the victim of a real crime, it is normal to remember clearly what specific day it happened something that is evidenced in 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 complaints .
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 pulling his bag or opening his backpack, without him having time to see it.
False thefts usually occur from behind because it saves the complainant from having to give details , saying that he couldn’t see anything else about who robbed him because he didn’t have time for anything. Words like “pull”, “shoulder”, “from the backpack”, “back” can serve as alarm signals.
3. Well-covered thief
In false reports of thefts and robberies, the criminal looks like a bad guy in a movie. It is common for him to be referred to as a person who wore a helmet and was dressed in black, since 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 was removed from the cast of La Casa de Papel.
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 like a bad experience. 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 an especially intense way.
The descriptions in false complaints do not focus on the facts, but on the object The words most mentioned in this type of complaints have directly to do with the economic value of the stolen object, such as “insurance”, “company” and “contract”.
Furthermore, it often happens that the brand of the stolen device is expensive, something that can attract special attention if it is seen that the complainant has a rather low purchasing power. This is why words like “Apple” or “iPhone” are found.
5. Distance from the complainant’s house
One of the most curious characteristics of false accusations is that the closer it occurred to the complainant’s home, the more likely it is to be true, unless it happened in one’s own home.
A report that specifies that the events occurred near the victim’s home, with expressions such as “in the front door of the house,” is more likely to be true.
Instead, Those who file false complaints tend to locate the facts far from their home away from acquaintances such as neighbors who could confirm to the police that that person is lying.
Related article: “The 95 best deception phrases”
6. Syntactic and grammatical aspects
The grammatical and syntactic resources of the complaint can also indicate whether it is false or not It seems that personal and demonstrative pronouns (I, him, them, that one, that one…) and even the verbs “ser” and “estar” appear in a greater proportion in true complaints. In false ones, on the other hand, complainants are unlikely to specify using specific pronouns such as “I”, “him”, “this one”, “that one”…
The syntax also gives away. Phrases introduced by the adverb “barely” (“barely I could see him”, “I barely remember”) usually indicate falsehood A high number of denials is also related to lying, with phrases such as “I cannot give more information”, “I have not received any injuries”, “I could not see him”, “I could not recognize him”…
You may be interested: “The 9 types of social exclusion, and how they affect citizens”
7. Background in action
True complaints focus on the substance of the action, while false complaints focus on describing objects, which is the only thing the complainant has seen. In the true ones, words related to specific qualities and actions appear in a greater proportion such as “face”, “hair”, “beard”, “age”, “man”… words that specify what the person who committed the crime was like and the specific situation in which the events occurred.
8. Extension of the complaint
False complaints are usually shorter , although we should not interpret this as saying that every brief expression of something is necessarily false. Complaints in a judicial context are one thing, and opinions posted on the comments page of a restaurant or hotel page are another, very different thing. Brevity is not a feature of all lies, but rather it must be contextualized.
Final reflection
All these characteristic features of false accusations do not in themselves constitute falsehood. It is their combination and persistence among the number of total 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 complaints and, even if they are known, they will not save anyone from having their complaint identified as false by a police officer well equipped 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 slip it to the officers.
