Offender profiling : Top Down Approach

Question 1

What is Offender Profiling ?

Answer 1

• Offender profiling is an investigative tool employed by the police when solving crimes, the main aim of which is to narrow the list of likely suspects.
• Professional profilers will often be called upon to work alongside the police especially during high-profile murder cases. Methods vary, but the compiling of a profile will usually involve careful scrutiny of the crime scene and analysis of the other evidence (including witness reports) in order to generate hypotheses about the probable characteristics of the offender (their age, background, occupation, etc.).

Question 2

What are the two different categories of?

Answer 2

• Organised offender
• Disorganised Offender

Question 3

What is Organised offender ?

Answer 3

• Anti social
• Not insane, don’t show remorse
• Have high intelligence
  -Attractive,married , skilled and educated
• Some degree - social grace - charming
  -Go to lengths to cover crimes
  -Follow the news on their crimes

Question 4

What is Disorganised offender?

Answer 4

• Not planned
• Leave fingerprints/blood
• No attempt to conceal corpse
• Young under influence , mentally ill
  Deficient communication and social skills
• Below average IQ
• Unstable family
• Been abused sexually by family member
• Live alone
• Kill close to home - no transportation

Question 5

What are the four stages of creating of profile ?

Answer 5

• Data Assimilation - review evidence
• Crime Scene classification -
  -organised or disorganised?
• Crime Reconstruction - hypotheses of sequence of events
• Profile generation- hypotheses related to the likely offender

Question 6

What are the key things about the approach

Answer 6

• Qualitative approach to offender profiling due to looking at overall picture and use of typologies.
• It is based on police experiences and case studies rather than than psychological theory

Question 6

Strength of top down approach

Answer 6

-Research shows it is very useful
- Police who have used the FBI methods (top down approach) have found it useful
-Copson (1995) conducted a questionnaire on 184 US police officers
- 82% said technique was useful
- 90% said they would use it again

Question 8

Counterpoint for strength of top down of approach

Answer 8

-what about remaining 10/18%
-ethnocentric
-sample size - hardly anything compared to whole world

Question 9

Limitation - og sample

Answer 9

-Og sample used to draw up initial categories was small and used extreme cases- 36 killers
-Crime classification were crude (rape)
-Details of the developments and efficiency of the methods were not published
- Limited, lacks generisability

Question 10

Strength - wider application

Answer 10

• Another strength of top-down profiling is that it can be adapted to other kinds of
  crime, such as burglary.
• Critics of top-down profiling have claimed that the technique only applies
  to a limited number of crimes, such as sexually-motivated murder.
• However, Tina Meketa (2017) reports that top-down profiling has recently been applied to burglary, leading to an 85% rise in solved cases in three US states. The detection
  method retains the organised-disorganised distinction but also adds two new categories: interpersonal (offender usually knows their victim and steals something
  of significance) and opportunistic (generally inexperienced young offender).
• This suggests that top-down profiling has wider application than was
  originally assumed.