Forensic Psychology Flashcards
What are the two approaches to offender profiling?
The top-down approach
The bottom-up approach
What is offender profiling?
A tool used by the police to narrow the list of suspects in a crime.
What are the two types of offender according to the top-down approach?
Organised and disorganised
What are the characteristics of an organised offender?
They show evidence of having planned the crime in advance. The victim is usually targeted. There is little evidence left behind at the scene. They tend to be of above-average intelligence, have a professional occupation and are socially competent. They tend to be married and have children.
What are the characteristics of a disorganised offender?
They show little evidence of planning, victims often aren’t targeted, body is usually left behind. They tend to have a lower than average IQ, be in unskilled work or unemployed. They have a history of failed relationships and live alone relatively close to the crime scene.
What are the 4 stages to constructing an FBI profile?
1- data assimilation (reviews evidence)
2- crime scene classification (organised or disorganised)
3- crime reconstruction (hypotheses in terms of sequence of events)
4- profile generation (hypotheses related to the likely offender)
How was the top-down approach created?
FBI looked at data from interviews with 36 sexually motivated murderers. They said that the data could be categorised into organised and disorganised crimes.
What is a strength of the top-down approach? (Wider application)
It can be adapted to other types of crime such as burglary.
Critics said that top-down profiling only applies to a limited number of crimes.
It has been proved that top-down profiling has been applied to burglary. This suggests that the top-down approach has wider application than was originally assumed.
What is a limitation of the top-down approach? (Flawed evidence)
The top-down approach was developed using interviews from 36 murderers. Some have argued that the sample was poor- the FBI didn’t select a large or random sample, and it only included murderers. There was no standard set of questions so each interview was different and therefore incomparable. Suggests that the top down approach doesn’t have a scientific base.
What is the aim of the bottom-up approach?
To generate a picture of the offender.
What is investigative psychology?
A form of bottom-up profiling that matches details from the crime scene with statistical analysis of typical offender behaviour patterns based on psychological theory
What is geographical profiling?
A form of bottom-up profiling based in he principle of spatial consistency- that an offenders operational base and possible future offences are revealed by the geographical location of their previous crimes.
What is Canter’s circle theory?
The pattern of offending makes a circle around the offender’s home base.
What are the two ways to describe an offender according to geographical profiling? And what do they tell us about the offender?
The marauder- operates in a close proximity to their home base
The commuter- likely to travel a distance away from their usual residence
What is a strength of geographical profiling? (Bottom-up approach) (supporting evidence)
Canter- collected info from 120 murder cases in the US. Smallest space analysis revealed spatial consistency in the behaviour of the colours.
The location of each body created a centre of gravity. This may Bebe abuse when a killer leaves their home to dump a body they may go in a different direction each time creating a circle around their house. This effect was more noticeable for marauders. This supports the idea that geographical information can be used to identify an offender.
