offender profiling A01 Flashcards
what is offender profiling
offender profiling is an investigative technique to narrow down a lift of suspects by narrowing down physical and behavioural characteristics by crime scene analysis
-top down+bottom up approach
how was top down approach created?
-profilers work down
-made in USA with work carried out by FBI behavioural science department who conducted in depth interviews with 36 sexually motivated killers then concluded data could be categorised into organised and disorganised which could be used to find future offenders
what are characteristics of organised offenders?
-show evidence of having planned the crime in advance
-victim is deliberately targeted with a specific type of victim
hight degree of control with detatchrd and surgical precision with little evidence
-above average intelligence, skilled profession, socially and sexually competent
what are the characteristics of disorganised offenders?
little evidence of planning- spontaneous reflected in crime scene with body at scene. lower than average IQ, unskilled, lives at home
what are the stages of constructing an FBI profile
-data assimilation- evidence(pathology, crime photos, witness
-crime scene classification-(organised or disorganised)
-crime reconstruction-hypothesis of event sequence
-profile generation
what is the bottom up approach?
- profilers work up from the evidence to create a hypothesis about characteristics, motivations and background
-doesn’t begin with fixed typologies, more rigorous and grounded in psychological theory
what is investigative psychology?
-form of bottom up profiling based on statistical analysis and psychological theory
-aim to establish patterns of behaviour like key to occour at crime scenes
-statistical database that acts as a baseline for comparison with specific details about offends matched against a database
-helps to determine if series of events are linked
interpersonal coherence
-suggests the way an offender behaves at the scene with how they interact with the custom may reflect their behaviour in more everyday situations. level of control with rapists
-time and place significance-location chosen links to mental model of environment
-criminal characteristics
-criminal career and forensics awareness
what is geographical profiling
form of bottom up profiling based on patterns shown by location of series of crime with inferences made of likely operational base known as crime mapping based on the principle of spatial consistency
canters circle theory and geographical profiling assumptions
least effort principle-offenders choose closest primo ally attractive place
distance decay-number of crimes lower further away from base until they become more confident with buffer zone around house
circle theory- pattern of offending forms circle around offenders home - marauder(close)
commuter (travels)
