10. Offender profiling

Question 1

What is offender profiling?

Answer 1

Construction of a psychological, behavioural and demographic profile of the type of person likely to have committed an offence.

Question 2

Two types of analysis

Answer 2

• deductive (bottom-up)

- inductive (top-down)

Question 3

Actuarial vs. clinical method

Answer 3

ACTUARIAL: considers how groups of individuals with similar characteristics have behaved in the past

CLINICAL: aims to use a wider range of subliminal behaviour signs than other approaches to profiling

Question 4

Two key concepts

Answer 4

BEHAVIOURAL EVIDENCE: things that tell us how an offender went about committing a crime

CRIMINAL CONSISTENCY: the idea that a person’s behaviour at a crime scene is consistent with their behaviour in other contexts

Question 5

Modus operandi

Answer 5

Method used to commit the crime

Question 6

Personation

Answer 6

Acts carried out by the offender that are not necessary to carry out the offence (e.g. pseudo-intimacy, unnecessary violence)

Question 7

Criminal signature

Answer 7

Personation in serial offenders carried out every time they offend

Question 8

Staging

Answer 8

Offender deliberately manipulates the crime scene to avoid implicating himself in the offence

Question 9

Trophy

Answer 9

Offender takes an item related to the crime from the scene

Question 10

Souvenir

Answer 10

Offender takes an item unrelated to the crime from the scene

Question 11

Undoing

Answer 11

Offender attempts to “undo” offending behaviour by making it not quite so bad

Question 12

Case linkage (linkage analysis)

Answer 12

Identifying behavioural similarities across offences that suggests they have been committed by the same offender

Question 13

Typological profiling

Answer 13

Developed by the FBI
Top-down process
Crime scene analysis

Question 14

Investigative psychology

Answer 14

David Canter
Bottom-up approach
No initial assumptions made about offender