The Role of Victims in Crime Detection and Police Support of them

Victims have an important role in the process of criminal justice and without their cooperation this process would be interfered and its formation would face some problems and obstacles. After crime occurrence, those victims who suffered from damage and hurts enter the process of criminal justice. In this regard, police is the first institution that victims deal with. Hence, police have an important role in decreasing the victims’ spiritual and physical hurts and also legally support them. This support would be successful if police take the role of victims into special considerations and ask them to participate in different stages of the cases. In fact, police cannot achieve the required success in supporting the victims and decreasing the damage resulting from crime and in this regard they need the victims’ cooperation. In this study, the documentation, observation, interview, and content analysis methods have been used. The findings of this study show that the victims play a role in different stages: declaring victimization, crime detection, preserving crime scene, recognizing the convict or convicts, gathering the evidence, following up the cases, cooperating with police, obeying police recommendations, and even monitoring police performance including careful investigations, and rapid and accurate processing of the investigations. On the other hand, law enforcement experts believe that for achieving more success in police legal support of victims, it is necessary for the victims to take the police demands into considerations in this process. In order to operationalize the abovementioned issues, police should provide the executive pavements of victims’ participation in different stages of follow-up so that they can achieve the required success in legal supporting of the victims and demanding their rights.