Offender Profiling Flashcards
What is Offender Profiling?
refers to the process employed by the
police of using all the available information about a
crime, a crime scene and a victim in order to compose
a profile of the (as yet) unknown perpetrator
What are the two types of Offender Profiling?
- Top-Down Approach
- Bottom-up Approach
Geographical profiling
A form of bottom – up profiling based on the principle of spatial consistency: that an
offender’s operational base and possible future offenses are revealed by the
geographical location of their previous crimes.
Investigative Pyschology
A form of bottom- up profiling that matches details from the crime scene with
statistical analysis of typical offender behaviour patterns based on psychological
theory
Forensic awareness
Describes those individuals who have been subject of police interrogation before and
may show if they are covering their tracks
The commuter
Likely to have travelled a distance away from their usual residence
The marauder
Operates in close proximity to their home base
Modus operandi
How a criminal operates
Crime mapping
Information to do with the location of linked crimes scenes to make inferences about
the likely home or operation base of an offender
Jeopardy surface
Where the offender will strike next
Statistical data base
Patterns of behaviour based on previous crimes that have been Developed to act as
a baseline for comparisons
Interpersonal coherence
The way an offender behaves at a scene e.g. how they interact with the victim, may
reflect behaviour in more everyday situations
Centre of gravity
Understanding the spatial pattern of the behaviours provides investigators with this
and includes the offenders base- often in the middle of the spatial pattern
What is the Top-Down Approach?
Developed by the US (FBI) in the 1970s. They use in Delhi interviews with 36 convicted sexual killers. They also used information from the Behaviour Science unit.
What are the two types of offenders in the Top-Down approach?
Disorganised - an unplanned crime where the victim is not target and organised - a planned crime where the victim is targeted
