Top-Down

• An investigative tool employed by police when solving crimes
• Aim

  Professional profilers work alongside police in high profile cases

  Narrow field of enquirey and list likely suspects

  Careful scrutiny of the crime scenes and analysis of evidence in order to generate hypotheses about the probable characteristics of offender (age, occupation, background, etc)
• Origins

  Originated in the US as a result of work carried out by the FBI in 1970s

  Behavioural science Unit drew upon data gathered from in-depth interviews with 36 sexually motivated serial killers (ie Ted Bundy and Charles Manson)
• Also known as the typology approach
• Offender profilers who use this method will match what is known about the crime and offenders to pre-existing templates that the FBI develop

  Murderers or rapists are classified as wither organised or disorganised on the basis of evidence, and this classification informs the subsequent police investigation
• Typology classification 


  There’s a distinction between offenders based on the idea that serious offenders have certain signature ‘ways of working’ (modus operandi) and these generally correlated with a particular set of social and psychological characteristics that relate to the individual
• Organised offenders 


  Show evidence of a planned crime

  Victim is deliberately targeted and will often reflect the fact the offender has a ‘type’

  They maintain a high degree of control during the crime and may operate with almost detached surgical precision

  There is little evidence left behind

  In a skilled/professional occupation

  Socially and sexually contempt - usually married with children
• Disorganised Offenders 


  Show little evidence of planning

  Offence may be spontaneous

  Crime scenes and analysis tends to reflect impulsive nature of attack

  body tends to stay at the scene and there seems to be little control

  tend to have lower iq

  tend to be in unskilled work or unemployed

  Often have a history of sexual dysfunction and failed relationships - tend to live alone and close to the crime scene
• Constructing a profile

  Data assimilation - the profiler reviews the evidence

  Crime scenes classification - organised or disorganise

  Crime reconstruction - hypothesis in terms of sequence of events, behaviour of victim, etc

  Profile generation - hypothesis related to the likely offender (demographic, background, physical characteristics, behaviour, etc)
• Weakness - Limited application to different crimes

  Best suited to crime scenes that reveal important details about the suspect (Arson, murder, rape, cult killings)

  As well as crimes that involve macabre practices such as sadistic torture, dissection, acting out fantasies

  Most common offences such as as burglary and destruction of property do not lend themselves to profiling because the resulting crime scene reveals little about the offender

  Therefore a limited approach to identifying crime
• Evaluation - Based on evidence

  The typology classification system is based on the assumption that offenders have patters of behaviour and motivations that remain consistent across situations and context

  Several critics (eg Alison et al 2002) suggested that this approach is naive and is informed by old fashioned models of personality that see behaviour as being driven by stable dispositional traits rather than external factors that may be constantly changing
• Evaluation - Based on evidence

  Copson (1995) - surveyed 184 US officers, finding that 82% reported it useful and 90% would use again

  Only 13% of officers said that top-down profiling helped to solve the case

  Scherer and Jarvis (2014) argued that even if it doesnt directly lead to identification of perpetrator, it opens up other avenues for investigation and perspective
• Weakness - Oversimplification

  The behaviours that described each of the classification types are not mutually exclusive - a variety of combinations can occur at crime scenes

  Goodwin (2002) - asks how police investigators would classify a killer with high intelligence and sexual competence who commits a spontaneous murder in which the victim body is left at the crime scene
• Weakness - Oversimplification

  Goodwin prompted researchers to propose more detailed typological models

  Holmes (1989)0 suggests there are four types of serial killer

  • Visionary
  • Mission
  • hedonistic
  • Power/control

  Keppel and Walter (1999) focus more on the different motivations killers might have rather than trying to determine specific types
• Evaluation - Unreliable

  based on interviews from criminals - may not be mentally sound and could lie and have unreliable memories/recounts

  However, its qualitative data - more in-depth reviews and analyses and data, allowing for more comprehensive accounts