offender profiling

• what is the top down approach

  originates in US with FBI developed as a way of solving most extreme murder cases - behaviour sciences unit interviewed 36 most serious sexually motivated serial killers in US in 1970s
• what does typology approach mean

  based on how crime is committed and what is left at scene allows profiler to develop type of offender most likely to have committed the crime
• how does approach work

  match what is known about crime scene and evidence against existing template developed from previous interviews with killers
• what stages did Jackson and Becuerian develop

  data assimilation - collate all evidence, crime classification - organise crime into a type, crime reconstruction - develop predictions about motives and behaviour, profile generation - develop profile based on info regarding traits
• what did Canter et al say about this approach

  it is overly simplistic to reduce criminals to 2 types - reductionism, said that mixed typology is not the solution and it suggests that top down profiling is based on intuition rather than objective methods which could lead to bias in interpretation of evidence which reduces scientific credibility - also argues that data analysed from 100 murders using this approach found no evidence for disorganised category
• what is a weakness referring to personality

  typology classifications are based on outdated view tat personality is a fixed set of characteristics, several critics argued this idea now lacks temporal validity which suggests this new technique lacks predictive validity in terms of ability to identify stable, dispositional traits and/or predict next move
• explain another weakness 


  this only applies to particular crimes like murder, arson or rape and tells us very little about common crimes so it is limited
• what are the three main features of the bottom up approach

  interpersonal coherence - consistency between way offenders interact with victims and others in daily life , time and place - this info communicates about residence and employment , forensic awareness - if show understanding of police investigation they likely have previois encounters with police so will know hownto cover their tracks
• what is geographical profiling

  can help us find residence - Rossmo says offender behaviour = hunting patterns so through examining locations of crime and relationship to each other can tell us more about where criminal is, geo profiling assumes that criminals restrict their work to to areas they are familiar with so understanding spatial pattersn can help us know where they will strike next called 'jeopardy surface'
• what are two types of criminals in reference to geo profiling

  the marauder- operate in close proximity to home base , the commuter - travel away from home base
• explain canter and heritage's content analysis

  content analysis of 66 sexual assault cases - data examined using 'smallest space analysis' which identifies correlations across patterns of behaviour so able to establish clear similarities between offences and how behaviour changes over time - so technique is useful in identifying characteristics and next moves