Offender Profiling - The Top-Down Approach Flashcards
What are some of the characteristics of an organised offender?
- Plans the crime in advance
- Sexually competent
- A high degree of control/precision
- Little/no clues left behind
- Married
- Above-average intelligence
- Victim deliberately chosen and targeted.
- Professional occupation
What are some of the characteristics of a disorganised offender?
- Lack of planning/control
- Body and clues left behind
- Unlikely to have a partner
- Socially/sexually incompetent
- Low intelligence
- Poor employment history
What is the first stage in construction of an FBI profile?
Data assimilation - Review the evidence
What is the second stage in construction of an FBI profile?
Crime Scene Classification - Either organised or disorganised
What is the third stage in construction of an FBI profile?
Crime reconstruction - Form a hypothesis of the sequence of events
What is the fourth stage in construction of an FBI profile?
Profile generation - Form a hypothesis related to the likely offender
What is the strength - Canter 2004
Canter looked at 100 US serial killings. using smallest space analysis to assess the co-occurence of 39 aspects of serial killers. This revealed a subset of behaviour of many serial killings which match the FBI’s typology for organised behaviours. This suggests that a key component of the top-down approach has validity.
What is the limitation - Godwin 2002
Many argue that the classification is too simple and some crimes are both. It is also possible that someone may not conform to the classifications - someone with high IQ and sexual functioning can still act impulsively or leave evidence. Godwin argues that it should be more of a continuum than classification.
What are the two limitations?
Cannot apply it to all crimes - it has a lack of generalisability because it doesn’t work for non-violent crimes.
Androcentric - women may act differently to males and this is not accounted for.
