top down approach Flashcards
What is offender profiling?
Narrows field of enquiry
Profilers work with police
Scrutiny of crime scene and evidence to generate hypotheses about offender
What is the origin of the top down approach?
USA - interviews with Ted Bundy and Charles Manson
What is the top down approach?
Typology approach - match crime details to pre existing template
Classification informs police investigation
What are the types of offender?
Organised
Disorganised
What are organised offenders?
Planned crime and victim
High control
Little evidence left
High IQ, skilled profession, married
What are disorganised offenders?
No planning, spontaneous
Little control
Low IQ, unskilled, live alone and close to crime scene
What are the stages of constructing an FBI profile?
Data assimilation
Crime scene classification
Crime reconstruction
Profile generation
What is data assimilation?
Profiler reviews evidence
What is crime scene classification?
Classify as either organised or disorganised
What is crime reconstruction?
Hypotheses in terms of events etc
What is profile generation?
Hypotheses related to likely offender
Evaluation - only applies to certain crimes
Best suited to crimes to reveal details about suspect like murder
Common offences like burglary don’t work - crime scene doesn’t reveal much
Evaluation - based on outdated models of personality
Based on idea that offenders have consistent patterns and motivations
Critics - naive, personality is not driven by stable dispositional traits but constantly changing external factors
Evaluation - evidence doesn’t support disorganised offender
Canter - smallest space analysis
Details of murders examined with reference to characteristics linked to types of offender
Evidence for organised but not disorganised
Evaluation - classification too simplistic
Not mutually exclusive
High IQ, spontaneous murder
Holmes - visionary, mission, hedonistic, power/control
