Top-down approach
Cards (9)
- What is offender profiling?
- An investigative tool employed by the police to solve crimes, main aim being to narrow down the list of likely suspects
- Compiling of a profile usually involve careful scrutiny of the crime scene and analysis of other evidence to generate a hypothesis about the probably characteristics of the offender
- What is the top-down approach?
- An American approach, originating the USA as a result of 1970s FBI work including interviews with 36 sexually-motivated serial killers, concluding the data could be categorised into organised or disorganised crime
- Officers using this method 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?
- Carefully premeditated crimes, leaving little evidence behind
- Antisocial, often psychopathic
- Likely to be intelligent, attractive, employed 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/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 constructing an FBI profile?
- Data Assimilation - reviewing evidence from crime scene photographs, witness reports, etc.
- Crime scene classification - organised or disorganised?
- Crime reconstruction - hypothesis in terms of sequence of events and victim's behaviour
- Profile generation - hypothesis related the likely offender e.g. demographic background, physical characteristics, behaviour, etc.
- What is one strength of the top-down approach?
- Research support for effectiveness: Copson (1995) conducted a questionnaire on 184 US police officers - 82% said it was useful and 92% said they would use it again
- However, due to research being ethnocentric and using a small sample size we cannot conclude that this is generalisable to the entire US police force - possibility that not everyone may actually find the method useful
- What is another strength of the top-down approach?
- Wider application: Meketa (2017) reported that top-down profiling has recently been applied to burglary leading to an 85% rise in solved cases in 3 US states
- Adds two additional categories: interpersonal offender (knows victim personally, steals things of significance to them and tends to be more vindictive) and the opportunistic offender (generally young and inexperienced)
- What is one limitation of the top-down approach?
- Categories on a continuum: Tuvey (1999) suggested the categories of organised and disorganised are not dichotomous and can overlap
- Godwin (2002) said that it is difficult to class killers as one or the other due to contrasting characteristics like high intelligence and spontaneous murders leaving the body behind e.g. Adrian Babb showed traits of both categories
- Shows the top-down approach cannot be applied to all situations making it a limited approach
- What is another limitation of the top-down approach?
- Subjective approach: method relies solely on the opinions and intuition of profilers which can be highly subjective and varies depending on experience and individual differences
- Barnum effect: its' descriptions can be made to fit any situation
- Means police forces should be cautious using this technique as wrong profiling could result in wrongful convictions and a criminal on the loose