3. Offender Profiling: The Top-down approach Flashcards
What is offender profiling?
A behavioural and analytical tool that is intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown offenders.
What are the key aspects in the offender profiling process?
Scrutiny of the crime-scene and analysis of the evidence in order to form hypotheses about the probable characteristics of the offender.
What is the Top-down approach to offender profiling?
Profilers start with a pre-established typology and then work down in order to assign offenders to one of two categories based on witness accounts and evidence from the crime-scene.
Where did the Top-down approach originate from and how did it come to be?
It originated from America - in the 1970s some FBI agents interviewed in detail 36 sexually motivated offenders - they analysed the data from this and formed two categories; organised and disorganised offenders - these categories formed the typologies/templates future investigators would work-down from in the Top-down approach
What is the organised/disorganised theory of criminal profiling based on?
The idea that serious offenders have certain ‘ways of working’ and these generally correlate with social/psychological characteristics that relate to the individual
What are organised offenders?
An offender that shows evidence of planning, targets the victim and seems socially and sexually competent with higher than average intelligence.
What are disorganised offenders?
An offender that shows little evidence of planning, leaves clues and tends to be socially and sexually incompetent with lower than average intelligence.
What are the 4 main stages in the FBI offender profiling process?
Data Assimilation - investigator reviews the evidence
Crime Scene Classification - either organised or disorganised
Crime Reconstruction - hypotheses in terms of sequencing of events, behaviour of the victim etc.
What are the evaluation points for the top-down approach to offender profiling?
(-) Only applies to particular crimes - only works for crime scenes that leave details about the offender e.g. sadistic murders, not for burglaries etc
(-) Based on outdated models of personality - thinks offenders maintain patterns of behaviour across time and situations - ‘static models of personality’ - poor validity
(-) Canter et al. did a study of 100 US offenders using 39 characteristics of dis/org offenders - no distinct category for disorganised - undermines whole theory
(-) Classification is too simplistic - behavioural categories for dis/org offenders are not mutually exclusive - confusion
