Dr. Robert D’Ovidio was raised in central New Jersey. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in economics from Rutgers University, a Master’s in Human Organization Science from Villanova University, and a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Temple University. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Culture and Communication, where he is assigned specifically to the Criminal Justice program. For any questions, he can be reached by email at rd64@drexel.edu.

Dr. D’Ovidio sat down with ASK’s Stacy Stanislaw to answer a few questions about his past work with the NYPD, and his current project, creating a multi-university program for Criminal Justice.

: How did you get to Drexel?

D’Ovidio: When I was looking for jobs, I read in the newspaper that there was a press conference on campus about the movement towards the development of a research institute of computer crime, and that as my area of study, and I thought, “Now that’s where I want to be!” And actually my mentor, who has since passed away, my dissertation chair mentor, she started her academic career here in sociology. She said that would be a good place for [me] to go, given their strengths in science and technology. She knew Dr. Hall from her time here, and some of the faculty members here, a great group of people, and a good group of people to work with and learn from. So, I set my focus on getting a job here at Drexel and it worked out. And I’m glad it worked out; Drexel was my number one choice and I’m glad it worked out.

: Do you watch a lot of Law and Order and CSI and such?

D’Ovidio: Only because my wife is watching them—she’s addicted. I mean, they’re entertaining. The more you know about the field, the more you realize how ridiculous it is. I’m not a forensics expert but I know enough and I know enough forensics experts to know that CSI is just hilarious in terms of what they do on the show and what the realistic capabilities are.

: So, you don’t do anything really like that? Do people often ask you about that who don’t know much about criminal justice?

D’Ovidio: My area of focus is computer related crime, high tech crime. I get into the area of forensics, but more so from computer forensics, which those shows tend not to pick up on. So, in terms of forensics, my interests and experience lies in getting data in some digital format, obtaining it or getting access to it and presenting it in a manner that’s admissible in some sort of court proceeding, whether it be civil or criminal. That’s really what the field of computer forensics is about.

: I read on your website that you did do some work with the New York Police Department?

D’Ovidio: In the past I’ve done research work with the NYPD.

: Can you tell me a little bit about that? Just research?

D’Ovidio: I did a few things for them. I helped them with some of their in-house, analytical needs in terms of looking at case trends to sort of allocate resources for training. So, if they’re getting X amount of cases and the majority of their cases deal with fraud, are there specific skills that are necessary to conduct those investigations, and if most of the cases deal with that, their training budgets should be allocated appropriately. I helped them with developing presentations for conferences or public speaking engagements they would normally go out and do. Cyber terrorism was a common request for them to go out and speak on, so I helped them develop presentations for that. But the majority of my work dealt with my own research there. I wanted to see if the presence or the use of the computer as an instrument of crime had an impact on the types of offenders that committed crime. So, we looked at crimes that could be committed using various communication media, whether it was the computer, whether it was the telephone, or whether it was face-to-face interaction. Each communication medium brings with it contextual properties that affect behavior. As we move from a face-to-face encounter to a telephone encounter to a computer encounter, we reduce the amount of context cues that are available for one to base their reactions upon, or their actions upon. So, essentially what we do is we go from a context cue-rich environment in face-to-face, to few context cues in a computer medium, in a traditional, text based computer medium.

So, you go from a computer environment, a very anonymous medium, to a face-to-face environment, which is much less anonymous. So, that should have an effect on behavior. When it comes to crime, people that are less likely to commit crime in the physical world should be more likely to commit crime online, when you look at the relative rates of offending. We looked at specifically females, because we know that females have certain social stigmas. The social world of the female is defined where it’s more of a stigma for them to be involved in criminal activity, than a male. So, when you create an anonymous environment, you should see an increase in female offending when compared to the rates of offending in those other types of environments. The same thing with the middle class. The middle class has more to lose by committing crime than the upper and lower classes. So, we should have seen an increase in middle class offenders. But it didn’t work out that way. We did not see any change in middle class female offending. So, maybe our assumptions about anonymity and crime don’t apply to this computer environment. Or it could be that this crime that I was specifically looking at, which were stalking or harassment online and fraud, don’t apply to this. So, the stigma or sort of boost or push that the presence of position of anonymity gives an individual is not enough of a release to make them commit delinquent activities.