offender profiling - the top-down approach

Question 1

offender profiling

Answer 1

• investigative tool employed by police when solving crimes
• main aim is to narrow list of likely suspects
• professional profilers will often work alongside the police, especially during high-profile murder cases
• compiling of a profile usually involves careful scrutiny of crime scene and analysis of other evidence in order to generate hypotheses about probable characteristics of the offender such as their age and occupation

Question 2

the American approach

Answer 2

• top-down approach originated in US as a result of FBI work in the 1970s
• FBI’s behavioural science unit drew upon data gathered from interviews with 36 sexually-motivated murderers
• concluded that data could be categorised into organised and disorganised crimes (Hazelwood and Douglas)
• each category had certain characteristics which meant that if, in the future, the data from a crime scene matched the characteristics of one category, we could then predict other characteristics that would be likely
• offender profilers who use this method will collect data about a murder and then decide on the category that it best fits
• there is a ‘crime classification manual’ which lists identified crime characteristics

Question 3

organised and disorganised types of offender

Answer 3

• organised and disorganised distinction is based on idea that serious offenders have signature ‘ways of working’ and these generally correlate with a particular set of social and psychological characteristics that relate to the individual
• organised offenders show evidence of having planned the crime in advance
• victim is deliberately targeted, meaning that the killer or rapist has a type of victim they seek out
• offender maintains high degree of control throughout crime, little evidence left at scene
• tend to be of above-average intelligence, in a skilled occupation and socially and sexually competent, usually married
• disorganised offenders show little evidence of planning, suggesting that their crimes may be spontaneous
• crime scene tends to reflect this, they tend to have a lower IQ, be unemployed or in unskilled work, have a history of sexual dysfunction and tend to live alone and relatively close to the crime location

Question 4

constructing a FBI profile

Answer 4

four main stages -
1) data assimilation - profiler reviews the evidence
2) crime scene classification - either organised or disorganised
3) crime reconstruction - hypotheses in terms of sequence of events, victim behaviour etc.
4) profile generation - hypotheses related to likely offender, such as physical characteristics

Question 5

evaluation strength - research support ⭐️

Answer 5

• David Canter conducted analysis of 100 US murders each committed by a different serial killer
• technique called ‘smallest space analysis’ was used, a statistical technique that identifies correlations across different samples of behaviour, in this case to assess the co-occurrence of 39 aspects of serial killing
• this included things such as whether there was torture or restraint, whether there was an attempt to conceal the body, the form of weapon used and the cause of death
• analysis revealed that there seems to be subset of features of many serial killings which matched the FBI’s typology for organised offenders
• found high frequency of organised traits in majority of crimes
• suggests that a key component of the FBI typology approach has some validity

Question 6

evaluation limitation - lack of consistency (David Canter) ⭐️

Answer 6

• evidence to support typologies however many offenders seem to be combination of organised and disorganised
• many serial offenders have organised traits central to their crimes, makes sense as they have committed multiple offences and do not want to get caught
• some offenders may also change between organised and disorganised throughout their career
• use / reliability of typologies is limited

Question 7

evaluation limitation - counterpoint to research support

Answer 7

• many studies suggests that organised and disorganised types are not mutually exclusive
• there are a variety of combinations that occur at any given murder scene
• Maurice Godwin argues that it is difficult to classify killers as one type or the other
• a killer may have multiple contrasting characteristics, such as high intelligence and sexual competence, but commits a spontaneous murder leaving the victim’s body at the crime scene
• suggests that the organised/disorganised typology is more of a continuum

Question 8

evaluation strength - wider application

Answer 8

• critics of top-down profiling argue that it can only be applied to a limited number of crimes
• Tina Meketa reports that top-down profiling has been applied to burglary cases, leasing to an 85% rise in solved cases in three US states
• detection method adds two new categories (interpersonal and opportunistic)
• top-down profiling has wider application than originally thought

Question 9

evaluation limitation - flawed evidence

Answer 9

• FBI profiling was developed using interviews with 36 incarcerated murderers in the US, and at the end of the process, 24 were classified as organised and 12 as disorganised
• Canter et al. argued that the sample was poor as the FBI agents didn’t select a random or even a large sample, and it did not include different kinds of offender
• no standard set of questions, so each interview was different and not really comparable
• top-down profiling does not have a sound, scientific basis
• some of the murderers interviewed would not have been truthful depending on how they felt about the crime they committed
• profiler may be biased / skewed in the way they view the evidence

Question 10

evaluation strength - crime classification manual

Answer 10

• identifying if a criminal is organised or disorganised can be reliably identified by looking at how the crime characteristics have been categorised
• this should enable forensic profilers to consistently create the same profile
• the manual provides a reliable tool for measuring / creating a top-down profile