Offender profiling
A tool to help investigators to accurately predict likely offenders
- Usually involve careful scrutiny of crime scene & analysis of other evidence to generate hypotheses
Top-down approach
Start with pre-established typology and work down to lower levels in order to assign offenders to one of two categories based on witness accounts and evidence from the crime scene
- Data could be categorised into organised or disorganised crime
- Will collect data about a murder and then decide on the category the data best fits
Organised offender
Evidence of planning, targets victim, tends to be socially and sexually competent with higher-than-average intelligence
- High degree of control during crime and may operate with almost detached surgical precision
- Little evidence or clues left behind
Disorganised offender
Little evidence of planning, leaves cues, tends be to socially and sexually incompetent with lower-than-average intelligence
- Impulsive nature of attack - body still at scene and very little control on part of the offender
The American approach
Offenders assigned to one of two pre-existing categories based on witness accounts and evidence from crime scenes (top-down approach)
Constructing an FBI profile
- Data assimilation
- Crime scene classification
- Crime reconstruction
- Profile generation
Research support
- Strength - support for distinct organised category
- Canter et al - 100 US murders committed by different serial killer - smallest space analysis - statistical technique that identifies correlations and found o-occurrence of 39 aspects of serial killings - eg torture or restraint, attempt to conceal body, murder weapon, cause of death
- Revealed there is subset of features of many serial killings - which is used in top down approach
however: - Organised and disorganised aren’t mutually exclusive
- Variety of combinations that occur
- Maurice Godwin - classifying killers is difficult - may have contrasting characteristics, high intelligence but commit a spontaneous murder
- Organised-disorganised typology is more of a continuum
Wider application
- Strength of top-down profiling
- Can be adapted eg burglary
- Meketa - top-down profiling recently applied to burglary - 85% rise in solved cases in 3 US states
- Adds two new categories - interpersonal and opportunistic
- Interpersonal - offender knows victim
- Opportunistic - inexperienced young offender
- Top-down profiling has wider application than originally assumed
Flawed evidence
- Limitation - evidence it’s based on
- FBI profiling developed using interviews with 36 US murderers
- Canter et al - sample was poor - FBI agents not randomly select and not large sample nor did sample include different kinds of offender
- No standard set of questions to not really comparable
- Top-down profiling does not have sound, scientific basis
Personality
- Based on behavioural consistency - can be seen across crime scenes
- In contrast
- Situation psychologists - Walter Mischel - behaviour more driven by situation
- Behavioural patterns tell us little about how the individual behaves in everyday life
