Forensics Psychology Flashcards
What is offender profiling?
Trying to generate a profile of an unknown perpetrator based on evidence from the crime scene
Two types of profiling?
- Top down - FBI approach
-Bottom up - British approach
What is the top down approach?
This approach starts with the big picture and then fills in the details Hazelwood and Douglas (1980) made a distinction between the types of offenders organised and disorganised
What is an organised offender?
An organised offender leads an ordered life and kills after some sort of critical life event. Their actions str premeditated and planned, they are likely to bring weapons and restrains to the scene. They are likely to be of average to high intelligence and employed
What are the characteristics of an organised offender?
- above average IQ
- socially and sexually competent
- married/co-habiting
- follows media coverage of crime
- skilled occupational
- experiencing anger at time of offence
What are characteristics of an organised murder?
- crime is planned
- leaves a few clues
- attempts to control victim
- shows self control at scene
- victim is a targeted stranger
What is a disorganised offender?
More likely to have committed the crime in a moment of passion. There will be no evidence of premeditation and they are more likely to leave evidence such as blood, semen, murder weapon etc behind. This type of ofender is thought to be less socially competent and more likely to be unep
What are the characteristics of a disorganised offender?
- lives alone, near to crime scene
- sexually and socially inadequate
- unskilled occupation or unemployed
- physically/sexually abused in childhood
- frightened and confused at the time of attack
What are the characteristics of a disorganised murder?
- little planning/preparation
- little attempt to hide evidence
- minimum use of constraint
- random disorganised behaviour
What are the stages of Jackson and Bekerian (1997) crime scene analysis?
Stage 1: Data assimilation
- collection of all evidence available (e.g crime scene photos, post-mortem results)
Stage 2: Crime classification
- organising crime into a particular type (i.e organised or disorganised)
Stage 3: Crimes reconstruction
- reconstructing the crimes in order to develop predictions about the motives and behaviour of the offender/victim
Stage 4: Profile generation
- developing a profile based on this information regarding various characteristics, including physical appearance and personality
What makes the top down approach reductionist? (AO3 - )
The classification system (organised/disorganised) is too simple. Offenders are not simply either disorganised or organised. It may be that there are both organised and disorganised features to all their crimes
Explain how the top down approach has gender bias (AO3 -)
It often only applies to one type of crime, mainly violent crime and rape. This is a limitation of the approach as it is primarily applicable to one type of crime, sexual assaults, which also means that most of the offenders concerned are male. This causes a gender bias in the approach as the research focuses primarily on male offenders and a disorganised or organised female offenders may have different characteristics
