Top-down Approach

• Offender profiling is a behavioural and analytical tool intended to help investigate accurately, predict and profile characteristics of unknown offenders
• The Top-down approach is the American approach to offender profiling used by the FBI
• The top-down approach is where profilers start with a pre-established typology and work down to lower levels in order to assign offenders to one or two categories based on witness accounts/crime scene evidence
• The top-down approach has validity from research support e.g. David Canter et.al.
• David Canter et.al. used small-space analysis on 100 US murders to identify correlations across samples which revealed a subset of features matching the FBI's typology for organised offenders
• The top-down approach can be applied to other crimes e.g. Meketa found the interpersonal vs opportunistic offfender types for burglary
• The top-down approach has flawed evidence as the sample size for FBI profiling was only 36 offenders who were not randomly selected
• The Organised Offender shows evidence of planning, targets a specific victim, tends to be socially & sexually competent, and has a higher-than-average intelligence
• The Disorganised Offender shows little evidence of planning, leaves clues, tends to be socially & sexually incompetent, and has a lower-than-average intelligence