offender profiling ; the top down approach

Question 1

the top down approach uses a pre established typology ad the FBI method of profile generation to assign offenders to one of two categories

Answer 1

organised or disorganised offenders

Question 2

profile generation includes 4 steps:

Answer 2

crime scene classification
crime reconstruction
data assimilation
profile generation

Question 3

organised offenders are

Answer 3

socially / sexually competent
showing evidence of planning
unlikely to leave clues at scene
tend to have a specific type of victim
carry out attacks in a surgical manner

Question 4

disorganised offenders have the opposite characteristics and are

Answer 4

socially / sexually incompetent
often living alone / unemployed
random attacks
no specific targets
more likely to occur close to home or base (‘marauders’)
leaves clues / evidence

Question 5

this is all in line with the aims of offender profiling by reducing the

Answer 5

list of suspects , the police can investigate a narrower field of enquiry and so increase the likelihood that the case is solved

Question 6

• the main limitation is that the top down approach can only be used to explain crimes where they have obvious …

Answer 6

visible characteristics (e.g.
rape and sadistic murder) and so are unlikely to be effective in identifying criminals who are responsible for burglary or middle-class crimes, such as financial fraud.
This means that the top-down approach may only be an effective method of offender profiling for ‘blue-collar’ crimes.

Question 7

• it is unlikely that all offenders are able to be identified as either organised or disorganised

Answer 7

due to this oversimplication of the classification system, it may be more useful to study the motives that each criminal has, as suggested by Keppel and Walter (1999).
In this way, seemingly contradictory crimes can still be explained e.g. a criminal who leaves no clues at the crime scene but appears to be sexually incompetent and who carried out an impulsive attack on a stranger.

Question 8

• there is evidence to support the existence of an organised offender type , but the same cannot be said for the disorganised type

Answer 8

as suggested by Canter et al (2004). These researchers used the statistical technique of smallest space analysis to analyse the data from 100 murders in the US, with comparisons of each made to 39 typical traits of both offender types.
The fact that disorganised offenders cannot be identified as distinctly different from organised offenders suggests that this system lacks validity and breadth.