A03 Offender Profiling Flashcards
What did David Canter (2004) find after looking at 100 US serial killings using a technique called ‘smallest space analysis’, to assess the co-occurance of 39 aspects of the serial killers?
Analysis revealed a subset of behaviours of many serial killings which match the FBI’s typology for organised offenders.
This supports the top down approach to offender profiling as a key component of the FBI typology approach has some validity.
What did Godwin (2002) argue?
The classification of offenders should be more complex than organised and disorganised and it is probably more of a continuum rather than one type or another.
Organised/Disorganised = too simple and some crime scenes show traits of both, also possible for someone to not conform as expected to the classifications.
The top down approach traditionally only applies to severe crimes, namely violent crime. Furthermore, the vast majority of these crimes are committed by male perpetrators.
This is a limitation as the approach suffers from androcentrism, this is due to the theory being centred/focused on males.
Another limitation is that the theory lacks generalisability as it cannot be tailored to female offenders.
Whilst traditionally top down profiling is used only for serious crimes, it has recently been used for other types of crime. Meketa (2017) reports that recently in the US the top down approach has been applied successfully to burgalry, leading to an 85% rise in solved cases in the 3 US state. This type of profiling uses both organised and disorganised-organised but also adds two Rutherford ones, Interpersonal (offender knowing victim steals something personal), and opportunistic (often an unplanned inexperienced offender).
This is a strength of the top down approach because it has a wider application than originally assumed.
Canter (2004) argues that the FBI agents did not select a random or even large sample, nor did it include different kinds of offenders. There was no standard set of questions so each interview was different and not really comparable.
This is a limitation of the top-down approach as it suggests that top-down profiling does not have a sound scientific base.
The top down approach is based on behavioural consistency - that serial offenders gave characteristic ways of working (their modus operandi) so crime scene charactersitcis help identification. Mitchell (1968) argued that people’s behaviour is much more driven by the situation they are in than by a thing called ‘personality’
This is a limitation as it suggests that a priority method based on behavioural consistency may not always lead to successful identification of an offender
