Offender profilin

Question 1

What is offender profiling?

Answer 1

A behavioural and analytical tool that is intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown criminals.

Question 2

What is the aim of offender profiling?

Answer 2

it is an investigative tool used by the police when solving crimes. The aim is to narrow the field of enquiry and the list of likely suspects

Question 3

What is the general process of offender profiling?

Answer 3

• Scrutiny of the crime scene
• Analysis of the evidence – including witness reports
• in order to generate a hypothesis about the possible characteristics of the offender such as age, background, occupation etc…

Question 4

What are the 2 types of offender profiling?

Answer 4

• The top down approach (American approach) including organised and disorganised type of offender
• Bottum up approach (British approach) including investigative psychology and geographical profiling

Question 5

Who is the top down approach used by?

Answer 5

American - Used by FBI
Developed in the US in 1970s

Question 6

Explain top down approach

Answer 6

Profilers start with a pre-established typology and work down in order to assign offenders to one of two categories based on witness accounts and evidence from the crime scene. It is possible to categorise murderers as ‘disorganised’ or ‘organised’ killers.

Question 7

What do organised and disorganised offenders mean?

Answer 7

This is based on the idea that serious offenders have certain signature ‘ways of working’ and these generally correlate with a particular set of social and psychological characteristics that relate to the individual.

Question 8

What is an organised offender?

Answer 8

1. Shows evidence of having planned the crime in advance
2. The victim is deliberately targeted and will often reflect that the killer or rapist has a type.
3. High degree of control
4. Little evidence left at the crime scene
5. Above average intelligence
6. Skilled, professional, social and sexually competent
7. May be married and have children

Question 9

What is a disorganised offender?

Answer 9

1. Show little evidence of planning – suggesting that the offence may have been a spontaneous, spur of the moment
2. Tends to reflect the impulsive nature of the attack – body left at the crime scene and appears to have been very little control
3. They tend to have lower that average IQ, in unskilled work or unemployed
4. History of sexual dysfunction and failed relationships
5. Tend to live alone and often relatively close to where the offence took place

Question 10

What are the 4 main stages of constructing an FBI profile?

Answer 10

Data assimilation
Crime scene classification
Crime reconstruction
Profile generation

Question 11

What is Data assimilation?

Answer 11

Data compiled from police reports, post mortems, crime scene photos etc.

Question 12

What is Crime scene classification?

Answer 12

Profilers decide whether the crime scene is organised or disorganised

Question 13

What is Crime reconstruction?

Answer 13

Hypotheses about crime sequence, offender & victim behaviour etc

Question 14

What is Profile generation?

Answer 14

Offender’s physical, demographic and behavioural characteristics

Question 15

What is the aim of the bottom up approach?

Answer 15

To generate a picture of the offender, including their likely characteristics, routine behaviour and social background. This is through systematic analysis of evidence at the crime scene
The profile is data driven and emerges as the investigator engages in deeper and more rigorous scrutiny of the details of the offence.

Question 16

Explain the bottom up approach

Answer 16

Profilers work up from evidence collected from the crime scene to develop hypotheses about the likely characteristics, motivation and social background of the offender.

Question 17

What is included in bottom up approach?

Answer 17

Investigative profiling + geographical profiling

Question 18

What is the difference between top-down and bottom-up

Answer 18

Unlike the US top down, the British bottom up model doesn’t begin with fixed typologies. Instead, the profile is ‘data driven’ and emerges as the investigator emerges in deeper and more rigorous scrutiny of the details of the offence. Bottom-up is also much more grounded in psychological theory than top-down approach.

Question 19

What is investigative profiling?

Answer 19

A form of bottom-up profiling that matches details from the crime scence with statistical analysis of typical offender behaviour patterns based on psychological theory.
- Patterns of behaviour that occur across crime scenes are used to develop a statistical database, which acts as a baseline for comparison (including Interpersonal Coherence, forensic awareness, significance of time and place)

Question 20

Aim of investigative profiling

Answer 20

• To establish patterns of behaviour that are likely to occur to co-exist among crime scenes.
• To do this, they develop a statistical database which then acts as a baseline for comparison.
• Specific details of an offence or related offence can then be matched against this database to reveal important characteristics about the offender.

Question 21

What is interpersonal coherence?

Answer 21

That the way an offender behaves at the scene, including how they interact with the victim, may reflect their behaviour in more everyday situations. E.g. some rapists want to maintain maximum control whereas other are more apologetic – this could reflect how they are in everyday life.

Question 22

What is forensic awareness?

Answer 22

This is when offenders have been subject to police investigation before and their behaviour may denote how mindful they are at ‘covering their tracks’

Question 23

Significance of time and place

Answer 23

This is a key variable as it may indicate where the offender is living

Question 24

What is geographical profiling?

Answer 24

A form of bottom up profiling based on the principle of spatial consistency - that an offenders operational base and possible future offences are revealed by the geographical location of their previous crimes. Inferences are made about the likely home/base of an offender known as crime-mapping.

Question 25

Importance of geographical profiling

Answer 25

Understanding the spatial pattern of their behaviour provides investigators with a ‘centre of gravity’ which is likely to include the offender’s base (often in the middle)
This helps to make educated guesses about where the offender is likely to strike next – jeopardy surface

Question 26

What does Canter’s circle theory do?

Answer 26

proposed two models of offender behaviour
Marauder + Commuter

Question 27

Marauder

Answer 27

operates close to their home base

Question 28

Commuter

Answer 28

travelled a distance away from home

Question 29

What does the pattern of offending do?

Answer 29

The pattern of offending is likely to form a circle around their usual residence – becomes more and more obvious the more offences there are.
This helps to decipher whether it is opportunistic or planned as well as mode of transport, employment, status, age etc.