offender profiling - top-down

• Offender profiling provides a description of the offender based on an analysis of the crime scene, the victim and other evidence.

  Copson (1995) argues police need 4 types of information from profilers

  • Type of person
  • Future threat
  • Case linked to others?
  • Interview strategies to be used
• Used in America by the FBI

  The top-down approach starts with the a classification of the crime scene and uses the information to make judgements about the likely offenders who would fit the circumstances e.g. age, background occupation.

  Relies heavily on the prior knowledge and intuition of the profiler.
• 1970’s – FBI interviews 36 sexually motivated serial killers, including Ted Bundy, looking at early warning signs and triggers.

  Used this data to identify typologies (categories) of offenders displaying different behaviours and attitudes.

  Two categories:

  • Organised offender
  • Disorganised offender
• There are 4 main stages in the construction of an FBI profile:

  1. Review the crime scene evidence (e.g. photos, pathology reports)
  2. Classify the crime scene as organised or disorganised
  3. Crime reconstruction – generation of hypotheses about the behaviour and events
  4. Profile generation – generation of hypotheses about the offender (e.g. background, physical characteristics etc)
• weakness -

  This kind of profiling is best suited to crime scenes that reveal details about the suspect e.g. torture/patterns etc. More common offences (e.g. burglary) do not lend themselves to profiling as the crime scene rarely reveals much.

  The approach is therefore limited to identifying specific types of criminals only (limited application)
• weakness -

  Having only 2 categories is very simplistic and it is likely that criminals do not fit nearly into one category or the other, making the prediction of their characteristics difficult.

  This reduces the validity of the approach and may reduce the accuracy of profiling
• weakness -

  The approach was developed using interviews with 36 killers in the US, a small and unrepresentative sample to base a profiling system on which may have significant influence on police investigations.

  The poor validity of the approach may have significant effects on criminal investigations and may reduce validity when identifying suspects/predicting next moves.
• weakness -

  Canter (04) analysed data from 100 murders in the USA and despite finding evidence of a distinct organised type, this was not the case for disorganised types.

  Reduces the validity of the classification of murderers into organised and disorganised types.