Offender Profiling Flashcards
What is offender profiling?
A behavioural and analytical tool that helps investigators accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown offenders.
What is the top-down approach to offender profiling? (US)
Profilers start with a pre-established typology and work down to lower levels in order to assign offenders to one of two categories based on witness accounts and evidence from the crime scene.
How did the FBI come about the top-down approach?
FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit drew upon data gathered from in-depth interviews with 36 sexually-motivated murderers including Ted Bundy.
They then concluded that the data could be categorised into organiser or disorganised crimes.
Each category had different characteristics, and so in the future they cold refer back to the characteristics and by used to find the offender.
What is an organised offender?
An offender who shows evidence of planning, targets a specific victim and tends to be socially and sexually competent with higher-than-average intelligence.
What is a disorganised offender?
An offender who shows little evidence of planning, leaves cues and tends to be socially and sexually incompetent with lower-than-average intelligence.
What are the 4 stages in constructing an FBI profile?
Data assimilation- The profiler reviews the evidence.
Crime scene classification- Either organised or disorganised.
Crime reconstruction- Hypothesis in terms of sequence of events, behaviour of victim.
Profile generation- hypothesis related to the likely offender- demographic, background, characteristics.
What is one strength of the top- down approach?
There is support for a distinct organised category of offender.
David Canter conducted analysis of 100 US murders each committed by a different serial killer.
He used space analysis to identify correlations across different samples of behaviour. Such as wether there was torture or restraint, wether there was any attempt to conceal the body and the form of murder weapon.
This analysis revealed that there does seem to be a subset of features of many serial killings which matched the FBI’s typology for organised offenders.
Showing that the top-down approach has validity.
Strength of the top-down approach- Wider application.
It can be adapted to other kinds of crime.
Meketa reports that top-down profiling has recently been applied to burglary, leading to an 85% in solved cases in the US.
The detection methods maintain the organised vs disorganised but also adds two categories:
Interpersonal- Offender knows the victim and steals something of significance.
Opportunistic- inexperienced young offender.
This suggests that the top-down approach has wider application than initially thought.
Limitation of the top-down approach.
Canter argued that the sample that the FBI used in their interviews of their 36 double murderers was poor.
The FBI agents did not select a random or even large sample size nor did the sample include different types of offender.
There was also no set questions in each interview so they were not comparable.
Shows that the top-down approach does not have sound scientific basis.
What is the bottom-up approach to offender profiling? (UK)
Profilers work up from evidence collected from the crime scene to develop hypothesis about the likely characteristics, motivations and social background of the offender.
What is investigative psychology in the bottom-up approach?
It is a form of the bottom-up approach profiling that matches details from the crime scene with statistical analysis of typical offender behaviour patterns based on psychological theory.
The aim is to establish patterns of behaviour that are likely to occur. This develops a statistical database in which then acts as a line for comparison.
What is interpersonal coherence in investigative psychology?
That the way an offender behaves at the crime scene, including how they interact with the victim, may reflect their behaviour in everyday situations.
What is forensic awareness in investigative psychology?
It describes those individuals who have been the subject of police interrogation before, their behaviour may indicate how mindful they are of covering their tracks.
What is geographic profiling in the bottom-up approach?
It uses information about the location of linked crimes to make inferences about the likely home or operational base of the offender.
This is known as crime mapping and based on the principle of spatial consistency. It can be used with the psychological theory to create hypothesis about how the offender is thinking.
The assumption is that serial offenders will restrict their work to the areas that they are familiar with
What is Canters circle theory in geographical profiling?
The pattern of offending forms a circle around the offender’s home base.
The distribution of crimes also leads us to describe an offender in one of two ways:
Marauder- Who operates in close proximity to their home base.
Commuter- Who travels a distance away from their usual residence.
