Top-Down Approach

• The top down approach only relates to certain crimes
• The profiling was developed based on sexually motivated serial killers and so only real reflects violent crimes
• The profiling method cannot be used to profile offenders of other crimes such as burglary which is much more common
• The profiling method is limited in its usefulness
• Strength of the profiling method

  • There's research support from Canter et al. to which he did an analysis of 100 murders, assessing 39 different aspects of crimes, e.g. attempt to conceal, cause of death and torture or restraint
  • There is a subset of features of many serial killers which matched the "organised" profile of the typology and has some validity
• Many studies show that the organised-disorganised offender type is not mutually exclusive, as a killer can have multiple contrasting characteristics, e.g. high IQ, but they can leave a spontaneous murder
• This suggests that the organised-disorganised offender type is just a mere continuum
• Typology classification system


  Based on the assumption that offenders have patterns of behaviour and motivations that remain consistent across situations and contexts
• Several critics (eg Alison 2002) have suggested that this approach is naive and is informed by old-fashioned models of personality that see behaviour as being driven by stable dispositional traits rather than external factors that may be constantly changing
• This means the top-down approach, which is based on 'static' models of personality, is likely to have poor validity when it comes to identifying possible suspects and/or trying to predict their next move