AO3

• Who found research support for a distinct organised category of offender?

  Canter et al
• What did Canter et al. do?

  Conducted an analysis of 100 US murders each committed by a difference serial killer. A technique called smallest space analysis was used- a statistical technique that identifies correlations across different samples of behaviour. In this case the analysis was used in order to assess the co-occurrence of 39 aspects of serial killings, This included things such as whether there was torture or restraint, whether there was an attempt to conceal the body, the form of murder weapon used and the cause of death.
• What did the smallest space analysis in Canter et al.’s study find?

  This analysis revealed that there does seem to be a subset of features of many serial killings which matched the FBI’s typology for organised offenders. This suggests that a key component of the FBI typology approach has some validity.
• Counterpoint to research support as a strength

  Many studies suggest that organised and disorganised types are not mutually exclusive, There are a variety of combinations that occur at any given murder scene. Godwin argues that, in reality, it is difficult to classify killers as one or the other type. A killer may have multiple contrasting characteristics, such as high intelligence and sexual competence, but commits a spontaneous murder leaving the victim’s body at the crime scene, This suggests that the organised-disorganised typology is probably more of a continuum
• Wider application: top-down profiling can be adapted to other kinds of crime, such as burglary
• Meketa reports that top-down profiling has recently been applied to burglary, leading to an 85 % rise in solved cases in 3 US states. The detection method retains the organised-disorganised distinction but also adds two new categories. 1. interpersonal (offender usually knows victim and steals something of significance) 2. opportunistic (generally inexperienced young offender). This suggests that top-down profiling has wider application than was originally assumed (only for sexually-motivated murders)
• One limitation of the top-down proving is that it is based in flawed evidence
• FBI profiling was developed using interviews with 36 murders in the US. 25 serial killers, other 11 being single or double murderes. At the end of the process, 24 of these individuals were classified as organised offenders and the other 12 were disorganised. Canter et al. have argued that the sample was poor, the FBI did not select a random or even a large sample nor did the sample include different kinds of offender. There was no standard set of questions so each interview was different and therefore not really comparable. Sugests no sound scientific basis
• Top down approach is based on the principle of behavioural consistency which should be seen across all their crime scenes. It should therefore be possible for profilers to link different crime scenes together making the offender easier to catch. However situationist psychologists like Walter Mischel argue that people’s behaviour is much more driven by the situation they are in than by a thing called ‘personality‘. Behavioural patterns see at a crime scene may tell us little about how that individual behaves in everyday life