Top-Down Approach

• Offender profiling is an investigative tool used by the police when solving crimes.
• The aim of offender profiling is to narrow doen the list of suspects with careful scrutiny of the crime scene and analysis of evidence, in order to find the offenders; age, background, occupation, characteristics ect.
• The top down approach to profiling originated in the US as a result of work carried out by the FBI in the 70s.
• The FBI interviewed 36 sexually motivated murderers and determined that data could be spilt into two catagories - organised and disorganised - certain chracteristic predictions can be made.