Offender profiling - Top down approach A03

Question 1

Strength of top down approach

Answer 1

-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 2

Counterpoint for strength of top down of approach

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Limitation - og sample

Answer 3

-Og sample used to draw up initial catergories 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 generalisability

Question 4

Limitation - outdated model of personality

Answer 4

• Alison et al (2002) - the typology classification system is based on the assumption that offenders have patterns of behaviours and motivations that remain consistent over situations and time - this is untrue and is based on an outdated model of personality