Offender Profiling:Top Down Approach

Question 1

What is offender profiling?

Answer 1

• An investigative tool used by police
• Aim to narrow down the list of suspects
• Involves carefully scrutinizing the crime scene
• Involves analysing evidence
• Generates a hypothesis about the possible offender

Question 2

What is the American approach?

Answer 2

top down approach
- Originated in 1970s by FBI
- Behavioural science unit used interviews with 36 sexually motivated murderer including Ted Bundy and Charles Manson
- Concluded data could be categorised as organised and disorganised crimes

Question 3

What does the American Approach consist of?

Answer 3

Each category has certain characteristics
- If data from a future crime scene matched those characteristics, we can predict other characteristics that might be likely
- used to find the offender

Question 4

What does Top Down mean?

Answer 4

You collect data about the crime and then decide which category it fits into

Question 5

What are the characteristics of organised offenders?

Answer 5

• Show evidence of having planned the crime
• Victim is deliberately targeted
• Usually has a ‘type’ of victim
• Offender maintains a high degree of control
  Etc

Question 6

What are disorganised offenders?

Answer 6

• Little evidence of planning
• Offences are spontaneous
• Impulsive attack
• Body usually still at scene
• Offended has little control of the situation
  Etc…

Question 7

What are the 4 key terms involved in constructing an FBI profile?

Answer 7

Data assimilation, crime scene classification, crime reconstruction and profile generation

Question 8

What is data assimilation?

Answer 8

Review the evidence (crime scene photos etc)

Question 9

What is crime scene classification?

Answer 9

Organised/disorganised

Question 10

What is crime reconstruction?

Answer 10

Sequence of events and behaviour of victim

Question 11

What is profile generation?

Answer 11

Hypothesis related to the likely offender, demographics, physical characteristics and behaviour

Question 12

What are strengths of the top down approach?

Answer 12

• Canter et al analysed 100 US murders committed by different serial killers
• Can be adapted to other types of crime

Question 13

Why is Canter et Al’s analysis a strength?

Answer 13

> Smallest-space analysis was used
(identifies correlations across different
samples of behaviour)
Assessed the co-occurence of aspects of serial killings
Included whether there was torture,
restraints etc
Revealed features of serial killings matching FBI typology for organised
offenders

Question 14

Why is adaptation a strength?

Answer 14

Meketa top down profiling recently applied to
burglary
- 85% rise in solved cases in 3 US States
- 2 new categories have been added
- interpersonal (usually
knows victim and steals item) opportunistic
(inexperienced young offender)

Question 15

What are limitations of top down approach?

Answer 15

• evidence suggests that organised and disorganised types aren’t mutually exclusive
• Developed using 36 murder interviews

Question 16

Why is evidence against organised/disorganised a limitation?

Answer 16

Lots of combinations occur at different
murder scenes
- Godwin: it’s hard to classify killers as
one or the other
- Killers have contrasting characteristics
- Organised killers sometimes act
unorganized
and vice versa
- tell us little
about how that offender acts in everyday
life

Question 17

Why is the use of murder interviews a limitation?

Answer 17

Canter et al: argued that the sample was poor
- It wasn’t a random or large sample and didn’t include
different types of offenders
- Each interview was not standardised
- Not completely sound or scientific