Offender Profiling- Top Down Approach

Question 1

What is offender profiling?

Answer 1

-behavioural and analytic tool that’s intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown criminals.

Question 2

What’s the main aim of OP?

Answer 2

-the main aim is to narrow the field of enquiry and the list of key suspects. This is based on the idea that the characteristics of an offender can be worked out from the offence and details of the crime scene.

Question 3

What are the methods for OP?

Answer 3

Methods vary but complying the profile will usually involve careful scrutiny of the crime scene and analysis of the evidence to generate a hypothesis about the characteristics of the offender.

Question 4

List of things that can help during OP?

Answer 4

-type of crime
-amount premeditation
-type of victim
-amount of risk
-how it fits with previous crimes
-time of crime
-location

Question 5

What is the top-down approach?

Answer 5

It originated in America from the FBIs BAU which used data from in-depth interviews with 36 sexually motivated killers.

This type of OP is based on the idea that serious offenders have a signature ways of working (modulus operandi) that generally correlates with a particular set of social and psychological characteristics.

Based on ev collected from crime scene offenders classified as organised or disorganised. These classifications are based on pre-existing templates that FBI developed and informs the following police investigation.

Also called ‘typology approach’

Question 6

Organised killers

Answer 6

-organised offender shows evidence of planning, targets the victim and tends to be socially and sexually competent with higher average intelligence.

-e.g Jack the Ripper, ted bundy

-leads orderly life, eldest child, premeditated, clean up, employed, planned and controlled, commits crime even after event.

Question 7

Disorganised Offenders

Answer 7

-a DO is one who shows little ev of planning, leaves clues and tends to be socially and sexually incompetent with lower than average intelligence.

-e.g Jeffery Dahmer

-youngest child, dysfunctional/failed relationships, often live alone and close to where offenders took place, poor work history, act of passion, no ev of pre-planning

Question 8

Constructing an FBI profile

Answer 8

stage 1:data assimilation-profiler reviews ev (crime scene photos, pathology reports etc)

Stage 2:crime scene classification- organised/disorganised

Stage 3:crime reconstruction- hyp in terms of sequences of events, behaviour of victim etc

Stage 4:profile generation-hyp related to likely offender e,g demographic background, physical characteristics, behaviour etc.