Forensic psychology - The top-down approach

Question 1

What is offender profiling?

Answer 1

-When assumptions about characteristics of an offender are made by a careful analysis of the offence they commit

Question 2

What does modus operandi mean?

Answer 2

-Crime is not random, offenders have distinctive ways that they commit crimes (Criminal signatures)

Question 3

What is the top-down approach?

Answer 3

• Profilers created pre-existing categories of offender types, organised and disorganised offenders
• The profiler uses personal experience and intuition to fit the offender into one of the two types, using crime scene evidence

Question 4

What are the characteristics of an organised offender?

Answer 4

• Organised offenders plan their crimes, they prepare by bringing weapons and restraints
• They take care to tidy the crime scene and they will hide the body
• This reflects an average or higher than average intelligence

Question 5

What are the characteristics of a disorganised offender?

Answer 5

-Disorganised offenders don’t plan their crimes in advance
(For example: They would use weapons found at the crime scene)
-They leave messy crime scenes (Evidence) and don’t try and hide the body
-This reflects a below average intelligence

Question 6

How were the definitions of organised and disorganised offenders created?

Answer 6

• Ressler created definitions of organised and disorganised offenders using interviews with real serial offenders
• 24 offenders were classified as organised and 12 were classified as disorganised, this suggests that there are distinct types of offender which aids with apprehension

Question 7

What is a weakness of the top-down approach?

Answer 7

• There was a restricted sample used to create the categories of offenders
• Only 36 serial sex offenders were used in the samples, so the results may not be generalisable to the wider criminal population

Question 8

What is a strength of the top-down approach?

Answer 8

• Snook conducted a study in which it was found that 94% of Canadian major crime officers agreed that criminal profiling helps solve cases and 88.2% of the officers agreed that it is a valuable investigative tool
• This suggests that detectives feel that offender profiling is effective in helping with their work

Question 9

What is a weakness of the top-down approach?

Answer 9

• Canter reviewed 100 US serial killers and found that disorganised features were rare and offenders often didn’t form a distinct “Type”
• This suggests that there is a false dichotomy between the two types and that most serial killers would fall into the organised category for offenders

Question 10

Why is the effectiveness of offender profiling difficult to assess?

Answer 10

• The effectiveness of offender profiling is difficult to assess because it is never used in isolation
• Other forensic techniques are used as well so it can be difficult to identify how much a profile contributed to solving a particular cases