What are Forensically Relevant Details to Police Officers?

Abstract In eyewitness research, forensic relevance refers to the perceived investigative utility of reported details. Despite its importance in the eyewitness literature, the concept lacks operational clarity in applied research. This study employed a mixed-methods design to examine which types of details police officers deem forensically relevant. Swedish police officers ( N = 68) viewed one of three staged crime videos and provided both open-ended responses and forensic-relevance ratings of specific eyewitness details. The qualitative responses highlighted Forensic evidence/Crime scene investigation (80.9%) and Suspect information (76.5%), indicating a focus on evidence recovery, including physical and digital traces, and suspect identification. Quantitative ratings showed that Action and Object details received the highest average relevance ratings; however, only a subset of individual details exceeded the high-relevance threshold (≥ 5 on a 6-point scale), including stabbing actions, weapons, uncovered faces, lack of gloves, and vehicle-registration information. Overall, the findings show that broad eyewitness-memory categories are useful for comparison with prior research, but insufficient for capturing perceived investigative utility. We argue that eyewitness research should supplement accuracy coding with item-level forensic-relevance ratings.