Top-Down Approach

• The FBI interviewed 36 sexually-motivated murderers and used this data, together with characteristics of their crimes, to create two categories (organised and disorganised).
• If the data from a crime scene matched some of the characteristics of one category we could then predict other characteristics that would be likely.
• The organised and disorganised distinction is based on the idea that offenders have certain signature ways of working.
• The organised and disorganised distinctions generally correlate with a particular set of social and psychological characteristics that relate to the individual.
• There are four main stages in the construction of an

  FBI profile:

  • Data assimilation - review of the evidence (photographs, pathology reports, etc.).
  • Crime scene classification - organised or disorganised.
  • Crime reconstruction - generation of hypotheses about the behaviour and events.
  • Profile generation - generation of hypotheses about the offender (e.g. background, physical characteristics, etc.).