Offender Profiling: Top-Down Approach

Question 1

What does offender profiling involve

Answer 1

Careful scrutiny of crime scene and analysis of evidence to generate hypothesis about probate characteristics of offender

Question 2

What is top - down profiling

Answer 2

. Originated from FBI Behaviorist science unit - drew upon data gathered from interviews with 36 sexually motivated killers
. Also known as typology approach, profilers will match what is known about crime and offender to a pre-existing template the FBI developed

Question 3

Why is it called Top-Down

Answer 3

Starts with a big picture and fills in details - relies on previous experiences of crimes from data gathered, investigators identify characteristics of the offender
^ offender categorised into either organised or disorganised

Question 4

Organised and disorganised offenders

Answer 4

Idea serious offenders have ‘ways of working’ (referred to as their modus operandi) - generally correlate with a set of social and psychological factors

Question 5

What are the 4 stages of constructing an FBI profile

Answer 5

1. Data assimilation = profiler reviews the evidence
2. Crime scene classification = either organised or disorganised
3. Crime reconstruction = hypothesis in terms of sequence of events, behaviour of victim, etc…
4. Profile generation = hypothesis related to likely offender. E.g: demographics

Question 6

Evaluation

Answer 6

Only applies to particular crimes (W) = best suited to crime scenes that reveal important details about suspect

Based on outdated models of personality (W) = approach is naive, see behaviour driven by traits rather than external factors

Evidence doesn’t support disorganised offender (W) = Canter used technique ‘smallest space analysis’ - analysed data from 100 murderers in US with reference to 39 characteristics thought to be typical of disorganised killers