Top down

• The top down approach originated in America based on interviews with 36 serial offenders

  distinguished between organised and disorganised crime

  baseed on the assumption that offender has a certain way of working
• organised offender

  shows evidence of planning, targets a specific victim and tends to be socially and sexually competent with higher than average intelligence in a skilled professional occupation

  high degree of control and operates with precision
• disorganised offender

  shows little evidence of planning so often spontaneous acts, leaves clues and tends to be socially and sexually incompetent with lower than average intelligence in unskilled work or unemployed.

  Crime scene often reflects impulsive nature of the act. They tend to live alone, relatively close to the location of offence.
• FBI profiling process

  4 main stages

  Data assimilation- profiler reviews the evidence (crime scene photographs, pathology reports, witness reports)

  Crime scene classification- organised or disorganised 

  crime reconstruction- hypotheses in terms of sequence of events and behaviour of the victim 

  Profile generation- hypotheses related to the likely offender, e.g. of demographic background, physical characteristics, behaviour etc.
• real world application

  used by law enforcement agencies to help identify and apprehend suspects in criminal investigations. For example a profile of the offender might be created based on their personality traits, behaviours, and past criminal history, which can then be used to identify potential suspects
• potential to be bias

  the approach includes the potential for biases and stereotypes to influence the creation of the offender profile. It also relies heavily on accuracy of the pre-existing knowledge about criminal behaviour and personality traits.

  this could cause unfair targets towards certain groups of people, and if the profile isn’t accurate it could lead to a wrongful accusation and conviction.
• flawed evidence

  FBI profiling was developed using interviews with 36 murderes in the US, 25 were serial killers, 11 were single or double murderers. At the end of the process, 24 were classified as organised and 12 disorganised. 

  The sample was poor as it wasn’t random or large, nor did it contain different kinds of offender

  there was no standard set of questions for each interview so therefore they aren’t comparable

  this suggests that top-down profiling does not have a sound, scientific basis 
• there is support for a distinct organised category of offender 

  canter conducted an analysis of 100 US murders each committed by a differnt serial killer.

  A technique called smallest space analysis was used, its a statistical technique that identifies correlations across different samples of behaviour. The analysis was used to assess the co-occurrence of 39 aspects of serial killings. 

  the analysis revealed that there is a subset of features of many serial killings which matched the FBIs typology for organised offenders, suggesting there is some validity