Top-down approach

• What is offender profiling?

  • Profilers carefully scrutinise the crime scene and analyse evidence and witness reports to generate a hypothesis about the probable characteristics of the offender
  • These can include age, background, occupation, and personality traits
• What is the top-down approach?

  • FBI Behavioural Science Unit interviewed 36 sexually-motivated serial killers and could categorise the data into organised or disorganised crimes/murders
  • Profilers using this method will match knowledge of the crime to a pre-established typology developed by the FBI
  • Will work to assign offenders to one of two categories based on evidence and witness reports
  • Qualitative approach + based on police experience and case studies rather than psychological theory
• What are the characteristics of an organised offender?

  • Crimes are carefully premeditated, little evidence is left behind
  • Antisocial, often psychopathic
  • Likely to be intelligent, attractive, employed, married, educated, skilled, cunning and controlled
  • Very difficult to apprehend as they go to extreme, inordinate lengths to cover their tracks
  • Often familiar with forensic investigations and methodology
  • Likely to follow news reports of their crimes and may even correspond with the media
• What are the characteristics of a disorganised offender?

  • Crimes are unplanned, plenty evidence is left behind
  • Often no attempt to move or hide corpse after murder
  • Likely young, under drug/alcohol influence, mentally ill
  • Deficient communication and social skills/unintelligent
  • Likely to come from unstable/dysfunctional families, often physically or sexually abused
  • Often isolated and have sexual aversions
  • Likely to have unreliable transportation so they kill victims close to home
• What are the 4 stages of creating a profile?

  1. Data Assimilation - reviewing evidence from crime scene photographs, witness reports, etc.
  2. Crime scene classification - organised or disorganised?
  3. Crime reconstruction - hypothesis in terms of sequence of events and victim's behaviour
  4. Profile generation - hypothesis related the likely offender e.g. demographic background, physical characteristics, behaviour, etc.
• What is a strength of the top-down approach?

  • Research to support that it is useful
  • Copson (1995) conducted a questionnaire on 184 US police officers - 82% said it was useful and 90% said they would use it again
  • However this research is ethnocentric due to only being conducted in the US and the small sample size decreases its' generalisability to the entire US police force
• How does the top-down approach have wider application?

  • Meketa (2017) found that the top-down approach has recently been applied to burglary, leading to an 85% rise in solved cases in 3 US states
  • Method adds 2 new categories ontop of organised and disorganised
  • Interpersonal offender: knows the victim personally and steals things of significance to them, more vindictive
  • Opportunistic offender: tends to be younger and inexperienced
• What is a weakness of the top-down approach?

  • Tuvey (1999): suggests that categories are not dichotomous, rather on a continuum and can overlap
  • Godwin (2002): it is difficult to class killers as one or the other due to contrasting characteristics such as high intelligence and sexual competence but spontaneous murders leaving the body behind
  • Adrian Babb is another example of this - he showed organised and disorganised traits showing that the top-down approach cannot be applied to all situations
• What is another weakness of the top-down approach?

  • Due to the approach relying solely on the opinions and intuition of profilers this can be highly subjective
  • Barnum effect: descriptions are made to fit any situation
  • Highly subjective and unscientific as there is a lack of standardisation for the assignment of categories
  • Wrong profiling could result in wrongful convictions and a criminal on the loose