Top-down Approach To Offender Profiling Flashcards
Define crime
Crime is an act committed in violation of the law where the individual receives some form of punishment from the state. It is an act which is harmful for the individual, group or society as a whole.
How would you define offender profiling?
A behavioural and analytical tool to help investigators profile characteristics of unknown criminals.
How would you define the top-down approach? What else is this approach called?
Focus on the bigger picture and use that to make predictions using a pre-existing template. Focuses on the general sweeping statements to make conclusions on the individual. This is also known as the typology approach.
When and where did the top-down approach originate? How what it developed?
Developed in 1970s in the US by FBI. FBI behavioural science unit gathered data from in-depth interviews with 36 sexually motivated serial killers. Concluded that serious crimes could be categories into organised/disorganised.
What does modus operandi mean? Why is this important?
A modus operandi is a signature or specific way of working. Knowing an offender’s type allows us to predict other things about them - certain MO’s correlate with psychological and social characteristics.
Give key characteristics of an organised offender
Planned and controlled, weapons are brought to the scene, evidence is destroyed or removed , has a victim type. The offender is usually unknown to victims, intelligent, socially and sexually competent, usually married, and are angry/ depressed.
Give key characteristics of disorganised offender.
Unplanned, weapon is improvised, body is often left at the scene,possibly know to the victim, lost group on reality, unemployed or low skilled work, live alone and close to victim.
Describe the 4 stages involved in FBI profile construction
- Data assimilation: reviewing evidence form the crime scene e.g. crime scene photographs or witness reports.
- Crime scene classification: organised or disorganised.
- Crime reconstruction: generating a hypothesis in terms of the sequence of events and the behaviour of victim and suspect
- Profile generation: likely offender e.g. demographic background, physical and psychological characteristics.
What crimes is the top-down approach limited to and why is this a limitation?
A limitation of the top-down approach is it is only useful for certain crimes with unique characteristics e.g. rape or killings. This means that it cannot help the more common offences e.g. burglary or common assault as the crimes aren’t unique enough to be characteristics. This means that the top- down approach is a limited approach for identifying offenders.
The top-down approach is based on the idea that people’s personality doesn’t change over time - why is this an issue with offender profiling?
Outdated models of personality that see behaviour as a result of stable disposition this means that it has poor predictive validity as it fails to take fluctuations into account.
Who found evidence that only supported that there is an organised offender, and why is this an issue?
Canter et al only found evidence of a distinct organised offender this means that the approach lacks validity
How is the 2-dimensional classification too simplistic? Why is this an issue?
The approach is outdated hasn’t adapted to the crimes where the offender shows signs of being either organised or disorganised offender. This means that don’t know what category they fit.
Maketa’s research involved 4 categories (disorganised, organised, opportunistic and interpersonal) this was better at identify offenders.
How can you criticise the research methods that went into the development of the top-down approach? Why is this important?
Typological approach developed by interviews from 36 killers. Very small and niche sample of self-report. This means that is could be unrepresentative and is likely to lack validity and generalisability.
