Lecture 4: Criminal and geographic profiling Flashcards
What is criminal Profiling?
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
What are the goals of profiling?
- Suspect prioritization
- New lines of enquiry
- Interview strategies
- Predict dangerousness
- Flush out offender
What is the history of profiling?
Jack the ripper and the profile of adolf hitler
Who were the 3 fbi profilers?
Robert Ressler, John Douglas, Roy hazelwood
What is the current state of affairs in Canada?
Criminal profiling
Geographic profiling
Truth verification VICLAS (computer system for identifying offenders)
National sex offender registry
What is linkage blindness?
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.
What is inductive profiling?
Profiling an offender from what is known about other offenders
What is deductive profiling?
Profiling an offender from evidence relating to that offender
What is the organized/Disorganized model?
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.
What are some organized offence/crime scene behaviours?
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
What are some disorganized offence/crime scene behaviours
Leave evidence Position body Post mortem (violence or sexual behaviour) Keep body no vehicle
What are some organized offender characteristics?
Intelligent Skilled in job Decent car Follows media sexually adequate lives and works far away from crimes
disorganized offender characteristics
Sexually ignorant
Knows victim
Lives alone
Lives close to crime
Criticism’s of criminal profiling
- Theoretical underpinnings
- Prevalence of mixed crime scenes
- Ambiguous advice
- Myth of the expert
What is geographic profiling?
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)
Stuart Kind
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.
Principle assumptions behind geographic profiling
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
Limitations of geographic profiling
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.
What is a computerized geographic profiling system
computer systems that use mathematical models of offender spatial behaviour to make predictions about where unknown serial offenders are likely to reside.
Goals of geographic profiling
Suspect prioritization
Patrol saturation and surveillance
Neighbourhood canvasses
Who created Rigel?
kim rossmo
who created Dragnet?
David canter
Explain theoretical underpinnings
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
Explain Prevalence of mixed crime scenes
Crime scenes are rarely exclusively organized or disorganized, many crime scenes are considered mixed, leads to problems with classification
