AO3 Top-Down Approach

• +Research Support for an organised category. Canter looked at 100 US serial killings and used the smallest space analogy to assess the co-occurrence of 39 aspects of the killings. This revealed a subset of behaviours 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.
• -Godwin disagrees with Canter. He argues that, in reality, most killers have multiple contrasting characteristics and don't fit into one type'. This suggests that the organised-disorganised typology is probably more of a continuum.
• +It can be adapted to other types of crime. Meketa reports that top-down profiling has recently been applied to burglary, leading to an 85% rise in solved cases in three US states.

  The detection method adds two new categories -

  interpersonal (offender steals something of significance)

  opportunistic (inexperienced young offender).

  This suggests that top-down profiling has wider application than was originally assumed.
• -Evidence for Top-Down Profiling is flawed. Canter argues that the FBI agents did not select a random or even large sample, nor did it include different kinds of offender. There was no standard set of questions so each interview was different and therefore not really comparable. This suggests that top-down profiling does not have a sound, scientific basis.
• Personality

  The top-down approach is based on behavioural consistency - that serial offenders have characteristic ways of working so crime scene characteristics help identification. Mischel argued that people's behaviour is much more driven by the situation they are in than by a thing called 'personality. This suggests that a profiling method based on behavioural consistency may not always lead to successful identification of an offender.