Crime Mechanism as a Category of Criminalistics

The current stage of criminalistics’ development is characterized by the active formation of its general theory, the definition of the object-matter area of research in this field of knowledge. The relevance of the issues studied in the paper is due to the need of a modern scientific concept of the matter of criminalistics development, identifying the range of patterns studied. The paper is aimed at analysing modern scientific approaches to understanding the crime mechanism as a structural element of the matter of criminalistics science. To achieve this goal, general and special research methods such as dialectical, historical, formal-logical, system-structural, legal forecasting, system and semantic analysis were used. It is proved that the crime mechanism as a holistic system of circumstances, processes, factors that determine the emergence of material and other information carriers about the crime event itself, its participants, provides the opportunity to put forward working investigative versions, investigation planning, targeted search for the consequences of the crime, offender’s identification, victim’s identification, contributes to the criminal legal qualification of the offense, and therefore undoubtedly acts as an object of criminalistics’ cognition. It is emphasized that the crime mechanism only determines the occurrence of traces (material and ideal), and therefore traces as consequences and as a result of the reflective process go beyond its internal structure (building). Therefore, the process of reflecting the crime mechanism in the environment, and hence the emergence of information about a crime and its participants should be considered as a separate aspect of the matter of criminalistics. It is noted that the criminalistics teaching on the crime mechanism studies the nature, essence and content of the functional side of criminal activity, patterns of interaction of participants of a criminal event with each other and with the surrounding material situation (environment), as well as patterns that determine the sources of criminalistics’ significant information on the crime itself and its participants. The process of direct formation of material and ideal traces, the patterns of reflection of the necessary information in them should be studied by another separate criminalistics teaching on the mechanism of trace formation. Attention is paid to the fact that the crime mechanism has connections with other categories of criminalistics and, above all, with the crimes’ criminalistics characteristics. It is stated that crimes’ criminalistics characteristics is a scientific abstract category, which reflects the qualitative and quantitative information of retrospective orientation as a result of cognition of the mechanism of certain types of crimes, i.e. that the crime mechanism is a reflected object, and criminalistics characteristics is a form of its reflection