Lecture 4: Criminal and geographic profiling

Question 1

What is criminal Profiling?

Answer 1

A technique for identifying the personality and behavioral features (and demographic) of an offender based on an analysis of the crimes he/she has committed

Question 2

What are the goals of profiling?

Answer 2

1. Suspect prioritization
2. New lines of enquiry
3. Interview strategies
4. Predict dangerousness
5. Flush out offender

Question 3

What is the history of profiling?

Answer 3

Jack the ripper and the profile of adolf hitler

Question 4

Who were the 3 fbi profilers?

Answer 4

Robert Ressler, John Douglas, Roy hazelwood

Question 5

What is the current state of affairs in Canada?

Answer 5

Criminal profiling
Geographic profiling
Truth verification VICLAS (computer system for identifying offenders)
National sex offender registry

Question 6

What is linkage blindness?

Answer 6

an inability on the part of the police to link geographically dispersed serial crimes committed by the same offender because of a lack of information sharing among agencies.

Question 7

What is inductive profiling?

Answer 7

Profiling an offender from what is known about other offenders

Question 8

What is deductive profiling?

Answer 8

Profiling an offender from evidence relating to that offender

Question 9

What is the organized/Disorganized model?

Answer 9

A profiling model used by the FBI that assumes the crime scenes and backgrounds of serial offenders can be categorized as organized or disorganized. Crime scene behavior is said to reflect one’s background characteristics.

Question 10

What are some organized offence/crime scene behaviours?

Answer 10

Planning 
Use of restraints
Ante mortem (violence or sexual behavior done before death)
Use of vehicle
Control of victim
corpse not taken
little evidence on scene

Question 11

What are some disorganized offence/crime scene behaviours

Answer 11

Leave evidence
Position body
Post mortem (violence or sexual behaviour)
Keep body
 no vehicle

Question 12

What are some organized offender characteristics?

Answer 12

Intelligent
Skilled in job
Decent car
Follows media
sexually adequate
lives and works far away from crimes

Question 13

disorganized offender characteristics

Answer 13

Sexually ignorant
Knows victim
Lives alone
Lives close to crime

Question 14

Criticism’s of criminal profiling

Answer 14

1. Theoretical underpinnings
2. Prevalence of mixed crime scenes
3. Ambiguous advice
4. Myth of the expert

Question 15

What is geographic profiling?

Answer 15

is a technique used in serial crime investigations that involves an analysis of crime scene locations in order to determine the most probable area of offender residence (anchor points- important place where the suspect is operating so work, home, friends home etc. some meaningful place)

Question 16

Stuart Kind

Answer 16

Forensic scientist for the UK home office.Called in as a consultant to the yorkshire ripper case. Believed he was a local man. Murder of girls and women occurring between 1975 and 1980. The killer was found to be from Bradford, a city very close to where a lot of the murders took place.

Question 17

Principle assumptions behind geographic profiling

Answer 17

Offenders tend to live within a circle defined by a diameter, that was dictated by the two farthest crime. Distance decay: as the distance from an offender’s home increases, the probability of committing a crime decreases

Question 18

Limitations of geographic profiling

Answer 18

It works because offenders typically travel short distances to commit the majority of their crimes and live within the area of criminal activity. But there are cases like bundy and lucas where they do not.

Question 19

What is a computerized geographic profiling system

Answer 19

computer systems that use mathematical models of offender spatial behaviour to make predictions about where unknown serial offenders are likely to reside.

Question 20

Goals of geographic profiling

Answer 20

Suspect prioritization
Patrol saturation and surveillance
Neighbourhood canvasses

Question 21

Who created Rigel?

Answer 21

kim rossmo

Question 22

who created Dragnet?

Answer 22

David canter

Question 23

Explain theoretical underpinnings

Answer 23

many forms of profiling are based on a classic trait model, whereby we infer traits from behaviours and use these traits to predict other behaviours. There is no empirical evidence to support this, behaviours are not as stable as they seem and they change based on situations

Question 24

Explain Prevalence of mixed crime scenes

Answer 24

Crime scenes are rarely exclusively organized or disorganized, many crime scenes are considered mixed, leads to problems with classification

Question 25

Explain ambiguous advice

Answer 25

Many profiles are ambiguous, the barnum effect (finding personal meaning in vague statements) Criminal profiles contain barnum like statements

Question 26

Explain myth of the expert

Answer 26

Profilers may be no better than bartenders at deriving characteristics from crime scene behaviours.

Question 27

What do profilers have to say about criminal profiling?

Answer 27

Some profilers downplay the need for empirical support by stating that the fact that their services are in such high demand proves its utility