top-down approach

• offender profiling


  - main aim of offender profiling is to narrow the list of likely suspects

  - professional profilers are employed to work alongside the police especially in high-profile murder cases

  - the scene and other evidence are analysed to generate hypotheses about the probable characteristics of the offender e.g. age, background, occupation
• top down approach


  - the FBI interviewed 36 sexually-motivated murderers and used this data, together with characteristics of their crimes to create two categories (organised and disorganised)

  - if the data from crime scene matched some of the characteristics of one category we could then predict other characteristics that would be likely
• offender types based on 'ways of working'

  - the organised and disorganised distinction is based on the idea that offenders have certain signature 'ways of working'

  - these generally correlate with a particular set of social and psychological characteristics that relate to the individual
• organised characteristics


  - evidence of planning the crime; victim is deliberately targeted and the killer/rapist may have a 'type' of victim

  - high degree of control during the crime and little evidence left behind at the scene

  - above average IQ; in a skilled/professional job

  - usually married and may even have children
• disorganised characteristics


  - little evidence of planning, suggesting the offence may have been spontaneous

  - the crime scene reflects the impulsive nature of the act e.g. body still at the scene and the crime shows little control on the part of the offender

  - below average IQ; may be in unskilled work or employed

  - a history of failed relationships and living alone, possible history of sexual dysfunction
• FBI profile construction


  1. data assimilation - review of the evidence e.g. photographs, pathology reports

  2. crime scene classification - organised or disorganised

  3. crime reconstruction - generation of hypotheses about the behaviour and events

  4. profile generation - generation of hypotheses about the offender e.g. background, physical characteristics
• strength


  P - research support for an organised category

  E - Canter et al (2004) looked at 100 US serial killings. Smallest space analysis was used to assess the co-occurrence of 39 aspects of the serial killings

  E - this analysis revealed a subset of behaviours of many serial killings which match the FBI's typology for organised offenders

  L - this suggests that a key component of the FBI typology approach has some validity

  COUNTERPOINT

  - Godwin (2002) argues that, in reality, most killers have multiple contrasting characteristics and don't fit into one 'type'

  - this suggests that the organised/disorganised typology is probably more of a continuum.
• strength


  P - it can be adapted to other types of crime e.g. burglary

  E - Meketa (2017) reports that top down profiling has recently been applied to burglary, leading to an 85% rise in solved cases in three US states

  E - the detection method adds two new categories: interpersonal (offender knows their victim, steals something of significance) and opportunistic (inexperienced young offender)

  L - this suggests that top down profiling has wider application than was originally assumed
• limitation


  P - evidence for top down profiling was flawed

  E - Canter et al (2004) argues that the FBI agents did not select a random or even large sample, nor did it include different kinds of offender

  E - there was no standard set of questions so each interview was different and therefore not really comparable

  L - this suggests that top down profiling does not have a solid scientific basis
• limitation


  P - personality

  E - the top down approach is based on behavioural consistency; that serial offenders have characteristic ways of working so crime scene characteristics help identification

  E - Mischel (196) argued that people's behaviour is much more driven by the situation they are in than by a thing called 'personality'

  L - this suggests that a profiling method based on behavioural consistency may not always lead to successful identification of an offender