The Top Down Approach

Question 1

The FBI worked with researchers….

Answer 1

Hazelwood and Douglas

Question 2

Who’s responsible for the book “the lust murders”

Answer 2

Hazelwood and Douglas

Question 3

186 what?

Answer 3

Police officers

Question 4

36 what?

Answer 4

Sexually motivated serial killers

Question 5

What are the 4 stages of the top down approach?

Answer 5

. Data assimilation
. Crime scene classification
. Crime scene reconstruction
. Profiling

Question 6

What is crime scene classification?

Answer 6

The second stage of the top down approach defining what the killer’s typology is and what kind of murder has been commited

Question 7

Turvey said that the top down approach was….

Answer 7

A false dichotomy and instead the typology should be viewed as more of a mixed category or scale

Question 8

What’s the Barnum effect?

Answer 8

It is the phenomenon whereby someone develops a cognitive bias based off of vague details.

Question 9

What does the Barnum effect apply to?

Answer 9

A criticism of the top down approach, that it’s a subjective method and whether someone is correctly captured and prosecuted could be based on whether the individual profiler is better or worse than others

Question 10

The Barnum effect criticism was put forward by who?

Answer 10

Canter

Question 11

The criticisms of the top down approach…

Answer 11

• The Barnum effect > unscientific
• not appropriate for other crimes > problem in the sample, it’s only 36 American, male murderers
• Turvey, perhaps it’s not a dichotomy

Question 12

Do crime catch people helps you remember…

Answer 12

The 4 steps of the top down approach.
Data assimilation, crime scene classification, crime scene reconstruction and profiling.