*The top down approach Flashcards
Define offender profiling
a behavioural and analytical tool that is intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown criminals. Compiling of the profile will usually involve careful scrutiny of the crime scene and analysis of evidence in order to generate hypotheses about the probably characteristics of the offender
top down approach
an american approach where profilers start with a pre-established typology and work down in order to assign the offenders to one of two categories based on witness accounts and evidence from the crime scene.
organised offender
an offender who shows evidence of planning, targets the victims and teds to be socially and sexually competent with higher than average intelligence.
disorganised offender
an offender who shows little evidence of planning , leaves clues and tends to be socially and sexually incompetent with lower than average intelligence
constructing an FBI profile (4 main stages)
data assimilation -the profiler reviews the evidence
crime scene classification -as either organised or disorganised
crime reconstruction -hypotheses in terms of sequence of events
profile generation - hypotheses related to the likely offender
AO3: only applies to particular crimes
top- down profiling is best suited to crime scenes that reveal important details about the suspect, such as rape, arson , cult killing. More common offences such as burglary and destruction of property do not lend themselves to profiling because the resulting crime scenes reveal very little about the offender. This means that , at best, it is a limited approach to identifying a criminal.
AO3: based on out dated models of personality
The typology classification system is based on the assumption that offenders have patterns of behaviour and motivations that remain consistent across situations and context. Several critics have suggested that this approach is naive and is informed by old-fashioned models of personality that see behaviour as being driven by stable dispositional traits rather than external factors that my be constantly changing.This means the top-down approach, which is based o ‘static’ models of personality, is likely to have poor validity when identifying possible suspects and trying to predict their next move.
AO3: evidence doesn’t support the ‘disorganised offender’
Canter et al using a technique called smallest space analysis, analysed data from 100 murders in the USA. The details of each case were examined with reference to 39 characteristics thought to be typical of disorganised and organised killers. Although the findings did indeed suggest evidence of a distinct organised type, this was not the case for disorganised which seems to undermine the classification system as a whole.
