Do We Need a Criminalistic Characterization of a Crime in the Criminalistic Methodology?

The paper deals with the essence of criminalistic characterization of the crime, its necessity and role in the criminalistic methodology. The attitude of the scientific community to this scientific category for half a century of its existence has undergone dramatic changes: from enthusiastic exaltation as a universal means of solving crimes to a useless “phantom” of criminalistics. However, despite criticism from a number of highly eminent scholars, criminalistic characterization of the crime has not disappeared from academic intercourse and has firmly enshrined its role in criminalistic methodology. The paradox is explained by its systemic need in the arsenal of this section of criminalistics. As the only acceptable indication of the empirical knowledge of the crime and the ways of its disclosure developed by criminalistics, the criminalistic characterization of the crime not only amounts to core of individual forensic techniques, but also defines the structure of the entire forensic methodology as a branch of the science. Attempting to abandon it leads to the emergence of various substitutes that are similar in content, but less successful with regard to terms. For these reasons, the criminalistic characterization of a crime cannot be rejected by forensics despite any criticism. It seems that the “phantom” is not the very idea of criminalistic characterization of the crime, but the method by which it was “filled.” A systematically necessary and successfully named design was unsuccessfully methodologically connected by its creators with statistical measurements of correlation dependencies between the main criminalistically significant elements of a crime. However, such measurements are unsuitable for a specific investigative methodology. The “filling” of criminalistic characterization with relevant information concerning criminal activity should be provided by the totality of methods available for empirical sciences without being limited to statistical measurements of the links between its elements.