A suspect is someone who is distrusted.
Suspicious is one or that which gives reason to suspect . This verb, for its part, refers to distrusting or being suspicious due to conjectures based on appearances or indications of truth . For example: “The cat is the main suspect for breaking the vase,” “The police arrested three suspects for the gardener's crime,” “A suspicious smell led investigators to the drug dealer's house.”
It is important to determine the etymological origin of the term at hand. Specifically, we can establish that it emanates from Latin, since it is the result of the sum of three lexical components of that language: the prefix sub- , which is equivalent to “below” ; the verb spectare , which is synonymous with “observe” ; and the suffix -oso , which can be translated as “abundance” .
A suspect is usually the one who provides grounds for making a bad judgment of behavior , actions, traits, etc. The term, therefore, has a negative connotation: the person is under suspicion of being responsible for something bad, and not good. It is not usually said that a subject is suspected of having made an anonymous donation, for example.
Crime suspects
The police and judicial investigators deal with the notion of suspects until they can prove the authorship of an illegal act. In general, police forces are not present at the precise moment a crime is committed, but rather reach the culprit after investigating the suspects (which arise from witness statements, background analysis, etc.).
It is common for investigators to analyze a multitude of variables when trying to solve any case, which will lead them to have several suspects that they will discard, based on the clues and evidence obtained, until they find the person responsible for the crime committed.
Fingerprints, absence of an alibi, traces of DNA, reasons for carrying out the criminal action as well as objects or eyewitnesses are some of the elements that are used by the police to establish one or more suspects.
Under legislation, a suspect can be detained by security forces.
Attitude that generates distrust
Sometimes, a subject can be considered suspicious because his or her attitude inspires distrust . A man who wears dark glasses and a hood and passes by the door of the same house several times, looking in all directions, may be suspicious, even if he has done nothing more than that.
Depending on the legislation of each country, police authorities may have the power to detain or at least interrogate the suspect, since it is assumed that he or she may commit a crime.
The suspicious term in cinema
In addition to all this, we would have that in cinema there are various films that use the term that we are now analyzing in their titles. Among them these two would stand out:
- "Suspicious" . In 1987 , director Peter Yates released this film, starring Cher and Dennis Quaid , which takes as its starting point the discovery of the murdered body of a woman and at the same time the suicide of a magistrate of the Supreme Court. Two related events that will be the subject of investigation.
- “Usual Suspects” . Bryan Singer fue quien dirigió este thriller que gira en torno a un misterioso incendio de un barco en el puerto de Los Angeles , donde mueren treinta personas.