Offender profiling

• Offender profiling- A behavioural and analytical tool intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile characteristics of unknown offenders
• Top down approach- profilers starting with a pre-established typology, working down to lower levels, assign to one of two categories-based on witness accounts+ evidence
• FBI’s behavioural science nit drew up data gathered from interviews with 36 sexually motivated murderers- Ted Bundy
• Organised offenders- evidence of planning, specific victim , socially and sexually competent, High IQ
• Disorganised offenders- little evidence of planning, leaves clues, socially and sexually incompetent, lower than average IQ - live alone - failed relationships
• FBI Profile

  1. Data Assimilation- profiler reviews evidence
  2. Crime scene classification- organised/disorganised
  3. Crime scene reconstruction- hypotheses sequence etc
  4. Profile generation- hypotheses linked to characteristics
• -Subjective [ copson] - found in survery that the approach only leads to success 3% of the time in catching the offender - due to inconsistent ways of determine psychological profiles
• -Based on flawed evidence

  • Developed using interviews with 36 murderers in the US
  • [Canter] argued that the sample was poor- not a random or large sample- does not include different kinds of offenders
  • No standard set of questions - each interview was different - non-comparable
• +Research to support

  [Canter] conducted an analysis of 100 US murders, each committed by a different serial killer - statistical technique - smart analysis - identifies correlations across different types of behaviours - 39 aspects of serial killing - subset of features match FBI’s typology for organised offenders