Top down Flashcards
What is offender profiling?
Investigative tool used by the police, to work out characteristics of offender, by examining characteristics of crime and crime scene
What is the top down approach?
Profilers start with pre-established typology and work down in order to assign offenders to one of two categories based on witness accounts and evidence from the crime scene
What is an organised offender?
An offender who shows evidence of planning, targets the victim and tends to be socially and sexually competent with higher than average intelligence
What is a 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
What is behavioural evidence?
Things that tell us about how the offender went about committing the crime
What is criminal consistency?
Person’s behaviour at a crime scene is consistent with their behaviour in other contexts
How was the data gathered?
Draws on data from unstructured interviews with 36 convicted serial killers and sex murderers in American prisons between 1979 and 1983
Who uses the top down approach?
FBI (American approach)
What are the four stages constructing a profile?
Data assimilation- gathering all evidence from crime scene
Crime classification- profiler organises data, classified as organised or disorganised
Crime reconstruction- attempts to reconstruct crime and generate hypotheses
Profile generation- profile constructed including hypotheses of background, beliefs, habits etc.
Only for certain crimes?
Mainly applies to violent crimes, can’t be used for smaller crimes such as theft
Scientific?
Not scientific
Based on profiler’s intuition- subjective
Based on interviews with psychopaths- may lie
Temporal validity?
Based on outdated models of personality as it assumes offenders have patterns of behaviour and motivations that remain consistent
Alison et al (2002) - based on old fashioned models that assume dispositional traits rather than external factors
Reductionist/oversimplified?
Disorganised/organised not mutually exclusive
Holmes (1989)- more detailed- 4 serial killer types: visionary, mission, hedonistic, and control
Ethnocentric?
Small sample of cases used, may not be representative of serial killers outside US
