Offender Profiling - The top down approach (American)

• Offender profiling - Behavioural + analytical tool intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile characteristics of unknown offenders.
• The top-down down approach - Profilers start with pre-established typology and work down to assign offenders to one of two categories based on witness account and evidence from the crime scene.
• Data assimilation - Review evidence (eg. photographs, police reports, post-mortems).
• Crime scene classification - Labels crime scene as either organised or disorganised.
• Crime reconstruction - Created hypotheses about crime sequence, offender and victim behaviour.
• Profile generation - Background, behaviour, demographic, facial features. etc.
• Organised offender - show evidence of having planned the crime in advance, and have a sense of purpose.
• Characteristics of an organised offender include - compotent, deliberatley targets victim, has a 'type', married, kids, highly skilled, surgical precision.
• Disorganised offender - Show little evidence of planning
• Characteristics of disorganised offender include - incompotent, lower than average IQ, history of sexual dysfunction, failed relationships.
• Top Down approach - FBSU concluded from in depth interviews from 36 sexually motivated murders including Ted Bundy and Charles Manson that data can be categorised into organised and disorganised.