Bottom up profiling approach

• The bottom approach is the UKs approach to offender profiling and it is a form of investigative psychology, focusing on crime scene analysis, and developed by Canter.
• The bottom up approach generates an idea of a criminal by establishing patterns which are likely to co-exist in order to create statistical database which can be used to compare.
• The bottom up approach using investigative psychology outlines key factors such as:

  • interpersonal coherence - offender behaviour and interaction with the victim
  • Time and place - indicates where the offender lives
  • Forensic awareness - Have they been in the focus of the police before? Would they go to great lengths to cover their tracks?
• Rossmo's circle theory highlights the importance of geographical profiling and investigating the base of possible future offences through the location of previous crimes.

  It states that people operate in a limited spatial mind-set with imagined boundaries.

  2 categories were proposed:

  Marauders - operate in close proximity to their homes

  Commuters - operate away from their homes, travelling distances away
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  Empirical support for the bottom up approach comes from Canter.

  Canter developed a profile based on the geological profiling information from other similae crime scenes and attacks.

  Using this profile Canter was able to catch and convict John Duffy the railway rapist.

  This therefore provides evidence for the successes of the bottom up approach and increases its validity.
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  Contradictory evidence comes from Copson who surveyed 48 police forces and found that the advice from a profiler was useful in 83 % of cases.

  However, it only led to an accurate identification of an offender in 3 % of cases, showing that it's not effective in actually solving and convicting criminals.

  Also Kocsis found that chemistry students produced a more accurate profile of offenders on a solved murder case than experienced detectives did, showing that perhaps the bottom up approach to offender profiling is a fluke approach and lacks validity.
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  Research to support the bottom up approach comes from Lundrigan and Canter who collated information from 120 serial murder cases in the USA.

  They found there was consistency in the spatial relationships and behaviours of the offenders and this was especially in those classified as marauders.

  This therefore supports Canter's claim that spatial information is key in determining the base of the offender which leads to their eventual conviction and thus increases the validity of the bottom up approach.
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  Evidence to support the use of investigative psychology comes from Canter and Heritage.

  They conducted an analysis on 66 sexual assault cases and used smallest space analysis to do this.

  They found all cases had characteristics such as impersonal language and lack of reaction to the victim and this helped to establish case linkage (were 2 or more offences committed by the same person).

  This supports the basic principles of investigative psychology in that offenders are consistent in their behaviour.
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  Countering Canter and Heritage is the idea that case linkage is dependent on crimes already solved in a database.

  Critics argue that the crimes are solved because they were straightforward anyway in terms of linking which makes for a circular argument.

  Therefore, investigative psychology may tell us little about a crime if there is little links between them, leaving them to remain unsolved.