Offender Profiling : Top-Down Approach

Question 1

About Offender Profiling

Answer 1

• Aims to narrow list of likely suspects
• Professional profilers are work alongside police
• crime scene and other evidence is analysed to form hypotheses about offender characteristics

Question 2

How Top-down approach Categories Were Formed - FBI data

Answer 2

• FBI interviewed 36 sexually motivated murders & used data collected + characteristics of crime to form 2 categories

=> if data from crime scene matched some features of 1 category, other characteristics can be predicted

Question 3

Offender types are based on what?

Answer 3

.. signature ways of working
generally correlate w/ particular set of social + psychological characteristics that relate to the individual

Question 4

Organised offender characteristics

Answer 4

=> evidence of planning + targeting victims
=> high degree of control during crime + little evidence left
=> above average IQ - in a skilled job

Question 5

Disorganised offender characteristics

Answer 5

=> offence is spontaneous
=> impulsive w/ little control of crime
=> below average IQ

Question 6

4 Stages of FBI profile construction

Answer 6

(1) Data assimilation - reviewing evidence
(2) Crime scene classification - organised or disorganised
(3) Crime reconstruction - hypotheses about behaviour + events
(4) Profile generation - hypotheses about offender