evaluation

• Turvey 1999 says that the distinction between two categories (organised/ disorganised) is too limiting and that offenders' characteristics exist as part of a continuum
• the sample of serious offenders interviewed in order to create the typologies was unrepresentative.

  Unlikely to represent all offenders as it only consisted of 36 male offenders who had been caught
• issues with validity of the data gathered in the interviews. serial killers are unlikely to be trustworthy source of information
• the usefulness of the typology approach is only limited to only murderers and the rapists as the technique was developed using murderers and rapists so cannot be used to create profiles for more common types of crime such as burglaries, assaults, car theft etc
• canter argues that the typology approach is not based in well-established psychological principles. he says that the profile is based on subjective judgements made by the profiler, rather than having a scientific basis
• Pinizzotto and Finkel 1990 used two closed police cases (sex case and homicide). They compared the profiles produced by trained profilers, students, FBI officers/ detectives with no profiling training and the clinical psychologists. Profilers were more accurate in the sex offence, but no significantly better then the others for homicide case. This supports the usefulness of the top-down profiling sex offenders but no murderers