offender profiling: top down approach

• Offender profiling

  A behavioural and analytical tool that is intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown offenders
• Top-down approach

  1. Profilers start with a pre-established typology

  2. Work down to lower levels

  3. Assign offenders to one of two categories

  4. Based on witness accounts and evidence from the crime scene
• Organised offender

  • Shows evidence of planning
  • Targets a specific victim
  • Socially and sexually competent
  • Higher-than-average intelligence
• Disorganised offender

  • Shows little evidence of planning
  • Leaves clues
  • Socially and sexually incompetent
  • Lower-than-average intelligence
• Top-down approach -

  • American approach - FBI
  • FBI behaviour science unit - drew upon data from in-depth interviews with 36 sexually-motivated murderers
  • concluded the data could be categorised into organised or disorganised crimes
  • if data from a crime scene matched some characteristics of one category - predict other characteristics - to help find offender
• top-down - organised and disorganised types of offender

  • serious offenders have certain signature ways of working - correlate with particular set of social and psychological characteristics that relate to individual
• Organised offenders

  • evidence of having planned the crime in advance
  • victim deliberately targeted - 'type'
  • high degree of control during the crime
  • little evidence or clues left behind
  • tend to be above-average intelligence in a professional occupation
  • social and sexually competent
  • usually married
• disorganised offenders

  • little evidence of planning
  • offences are spontaneous acts
  • crime scene - body still present, very little control from offender
  • lower-than-average IQ
  • unskilled work or unemployed
  • history of sexual dysfunction and failed relationships
  • live alone and close to where offence took place
• top-down - FBI profile

  1. data assimilation - profiler reviews the evidence
  2. crime scene classification - organised or disorganised
  3. crime reconstruction - hypotheses in terms of sequence of events, behaviour of victim
  4. profile generation - hypotheses related to the likely offender e.g physical characteristic
• AO3 - top-down - strenth

  P: there is research support for a distinct organised category of offender

  E: Canter - analysis of 100 US murders each committed by a different serial killer

  smallest space analysis - statistical technique that identifies correlations across different samples of behaviour

  • torture or restraint, concealment of body, murder weapon, cause of death

  revealed that there does seem to be a subset of features of many serial killing which matched the FBIs typology for organised offenders

  L: key component of the FBI typology has some validity
• AO3 - top-down - strength

  P: can be adapted to other kinds of crime

  E: Meketa - top-down profiling has recently been applied to burglary - 85% rise in solved cases in US states

  The detection method retains the organised-disorganised distinction but adds two new categories - interpersonal and opportunistic

  L: suggests that top-down profiling has wider application then was originally assumed
• AO3 - top-down - limitation

  P: the evidence in which it is based

  E: developed using interviews with 36 murders in the US (25 serial killers)

  24 = organised

  12 = disorganised

  Canter - sample was poor and did not include different kinds of offender

  no standard set of questions - every interview different so can't compare

  L: top-down profiling does not have a sound, scientific basis