Offender Profiling:Top Down Approach Flashcards
What is offender profiling?
- An investigative tool used by police
- Aim to narrow down the list of suspects
- Involves carefully scrutinizing the crime scene
- Involves analysing evidence
- Generates a hypothesis about the possible offender
What is the American approach?
top down approach
- Originated in 1970s by FBI
- Behavioural science unit used interviews with 36 sexually motivated murderer including Ted Bundy and Charles Manson
- Concluded data could be categorised as organised and disorganised crimes
What does the American Approach consist of?
Each category has certain characteristics
- If data from a future crime scene matched those characteristics, we can predict other characteristics that might be likely
- used to find the offender
What does Top Down mean?
You collect data about the crime and then decide which category it fits into
What are the characteristics of organised offenders?
- Show evidence of having planned the crime
- Victim is deliberately targeted
- Usually has a ‘type’ of victim
- Offender maintains a high degree of control
- Little evidence left behind
- Above average IQ
- In a skilled, professional job
- Socially and sexually competent
- Usually married
- Sometimes have children
What are disorganised offenders?
- Little evidence of planning
- Offences are spontaneous
- Impulsive attack
- Body usually still at scene
- Offended has little control of the situation
- Lower than average IQ
- Unskilled job or unemployed
- History of sexual dysfunction and failed relationships
- Live close to where the crime took place
- Often live alone
What are the 4 key terms involved in constructing an FBI profile?
Data assimilation, crime scene classification, crime reconstruction and profile generation
What is data assimilation?
Review the evidence (crime scene photos etc)
What is crime scene classification?
Organised/disorganised
What is crime reconstruction?
Sequence of events and behaviour of victim
What is profile generation?
Hypothesis related to the likely offender, demographics, physical characteristics and behaviour
What are strengths of the top down approach?
- Canter et al analysed 100 US murders committed by different serial killers
- Can be adapted to other types of crime
Why is Canter et Al’s analysis a strength?
> Smallest-space analysis was used
(identifies correlations across different
samples of behaviour)
Assessed the co-occurence of 39
aspects of serial killings
Included whether there was torture,
restraints, attempt to conceal body,
weapon used and cause of death
Revealed that there seems to be subset
of features of many serial killings that
matched FBI typology for organised
offenders
Why is adaptation a strength?
> Meketa top down profiling recently applied to
burglary
85% rise in solved cases in 3 US States
2 new categories have been added
Now organised/disorganised/interpersonal (usually
knows victim and steals items/opportunistic
(inexperienced young offender)
What are limitations of top down approach?
- evidence suggests that organised and disorganised types aren’t mutually exclusive
- Developed using 36 murder interviews
