Offender Profiling: The ‘top down’ Approach (forensics) Flashcards
What is offender profiling?
It is an investigative tool used by police, and is the act of narrowing down the ‘pool’ of likely suspects.
How are offenders profiled?
A variety of information is gathered from the crime scene, witness statements, and other info to identify possible characteristics of the offender.
What is the top-down approach?
An American method developed by the FBI to create categories, these categories can be used in future crimes to predict characteristics of the offender and help identify them.
How was the top-down method created?
Interviews were carried out by the FBI with 36 sexually-motivated murderers, including Ted Bundy. They recorded early warning signs, what led to the offences, and what encouraged them to continue. They then built up a picture of the traits held by serial killers, and made a distinction between organised and disorganised offenders.
Why is the top-down method useful?
Profilers of future crimes that included characteristics of an organised/disorganised crime could consult the categories to predict other characteristics of the offender to help identify them.
How is the top-down approach done?
The evidence regarding the crime is collated first and then one of the pre-determined categories is decided as ‘best fit’.
What are the categories?
Organised personality/behavioural traits
Organised features of crimes committed
Disorganised personality/behavioural traits
Disorganised features of crimes committed
Organised personality/behavioural traits
Intelligent, socially competent, has a good and skilful job, usually married with children
Disorganised personality/behavioural traits
Lower than average IQ, an unskilfully job or unemployed, lives alone (often near to the crime scene)
Organised features of crimes committed
Plans crimes, targets a specific ‘type’ of victim, high degree of self-control whilst carrying out the crime, leaves little evidence behind, does not know the victim
Disorganised features of crimes committed
Doesn’t plan crimes, leaves clues, shows little control whilst carrying out the offence, knows victim
How is the profile developed?
1- Data assimilation
2- Crime scene classification
3- Crime reconstruction
4- Profile generation
Data assimilation
The profiler analyses the evidence
Crime scene classification
The crime scene is categorised as either organised or disorganised
Crime reconstruction
Hypothesis are made about the sequence of events
Profile generation
Hypothesis about the characteristics of the offender are made
Who came up with the research to support the top-down approach?
Ault and Reese (1980)
What did Ault and Reese do?
They drew upon evidence from a rape case in 1979. They used the top-down approach to identify the offender and within 3 days of analysing the evidence, the suspects were narrowed down to 40. Further analysis of likely offender characteristics led to an arrest being made within a week.
Why did Ault and Reese’s research support effectiveness of top-down approach?
It supports how useful the top-down approach is in helping to profile offenders as this quick turnaround could have stopped this offender committing this crime again.
What are the limitations of the top-down approach?
The original interviews that founded the technique have been criticised.
There is evidence to suggest that offenders may not fit neatly into one category.
It assumes that personality determines criminality and that this stays stable over time.
Why were the original interviews criticised?
The sample size was small (36) and were only those who had committed one specific type of offence, so the results might not be generalisable. The sampling method was opportunity as it was offenders who were willing to talk. Interviews were unstructured and improvised, meaning data cannot be directly compared.
Why are the criticisms of the original interviews a limitation of the top-down approach?
This is a limitation because it lowers the validity of the approach.
What was the evidence that suggested offenders might not fit into one category?
Godwin (2002) suggested that a killer may have characteristics that conflict with
How much evaluation is there of the top-down approach?
Three limitations and one piece of research to support
