Top-down

• The American approach


  Originated in the US as a result of work carried out by the FBI in 1970s

  FBI's Behavioural Science Unit drew upon data gathered from in-depth interviews with 36 sexually-motivated murderers including Ted Bundy and Charles Manson

  • Concluded that the data could be categorised into organised or disorganised crimes
  • Each category had certain characteristics which meant that in the future if the data from a crime scene matched some of the characteristics of one category, we could then predict other characteristics that would be likely
  • Could then be used to find the offender
• Constructing an FBl profile

  1. Data assimilation - the profiler reviews the evidence (crime scene photographs, pathology reports, witness reports, etc.).
  2. Crime scene classification - as either organised or disorganised.
  3. Crime reconstruction - hypotheses in terms of sequence of events, behaviour of the victim, etc.
  4. Profile generation - hypotheses related to the likely offender, e.g. of demographic background, physical characteristics, behaviour, etc.