week 3 Flashcards
Offender profiling
early days
George Metesky: Beginning in 1940 hid 33 pipe bombs in public spaces in New York City. Twenty-two of those bombs exploded, injuring 15 people.
Profile by Dr. James Brussel heavy-set middle aged Eastern European Catholic Lived with sibling or mum from Connecticut
When might you use offender profiling?
An extension of an officer’s investigative actions
‘Tools in a tool kit’.
Definition of Offender Profiling
Aims to deduce characteristics of an unknown offender based on what is available from the crime scene, the victim and any other evidence available (Jackson & Beckerian, 1997).
Premise- consistency and homology
consistency and homology
Behavior consistency is the idea that an offender’s crimes will tend to be similar to one another.
Homology is the idea that similar crimes are committed by similar offenders
note this is from wikipedia and does not constitute a good answer for the question that will be on the exam
The criminal profile
contains what?
This will include the most likely characteristics of the offender. This might include, age, gender, marital status, psychological characteristics, beliefs, and values and, perhaps most importantly, previous criminal convictions, especially for the same offences and geographical location of home and work.
Investigation and apprehension
Hopefully, this will lead to the apprehension of an offender and the analyst can also add information concerning how the suspect can be interviewed.
Assumptions for effectiveness
If it is possible to infer something about the person from what happened at the crime scene then any two persons who commit a particular type of crime in roughly the same way should be rather similar to each other.
Offenders committing similar offences should have similar attributes.
Assumptions
There is the issue of behavioural consistency: the variance in the crimes of serial offenders must be smaller than the variance occurring in a random comparison of different offenders.
Research findings indicate that this is the case for rapists (Bennell, 1998; Grubin, Kelly, & Ayis, 1997).
Organized/disorganized hypothesisCanter et al., (2004)
“The organized/disorganized dichotomy is one of the most widely cited classifications of violent, serial offenders”.
“Although first introduced by the special agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Training Academy at Quantico in an examination of lust and sexual sadistic murders (Ressler, Burgess, Douglas, Hartman, & D’Agostino, 1986) the distinction has since been put forward to differentiate all sexual homicides and also types of arson in Douglas, Burgess, Burgess, and Ressler’s (1992) Crime Classification Manual.”
Organized Offenders
Organized offenders are hypothesized to kill after undergoing some sort of precipitating stressful event, such as financial, relationship, or employment problems.
Actions are thought to reflect a level of planning and control. The crime scene will therefore reflect a methodical and ordered approach. This is seen as being a consequence of the organized offender being socially skilled and adept with handling interpersonal situations.
Organized offenders are thus more likely to use a verbal approach with victims prior to violence and all these aspects of the offender are presumed to be reflected in the crime scene.
Disorganized Offenders
The disorganized offender kills opportunistically.
He or she will live in close proximity to the crime scene.
A lack of planning before, during, or after the crime will be reflected in the spontaneous style of the offense and the chaotic state of the crime scene.
This mirrors the offender’s social inadequacy and inability to maintain interpersonal relationships.
The lack of normal, healthy social relationships increases the likelihood of sexual ignorance as well as the potential for sexual perversions or dysfunctions as part of the homicidal acts.
Fox and Farrington (2015)
Opportunistic, vs organised
burglary
In this study, they collaborated with police to identify statistical patterns in offending behaviours.
“Opportunistic” offenders could be identified at burglaries because they made their way into a property because it had been left open, stole low value items, and showed no preparation or use of tools. Offenders in this category tended to be young, male, with prior theft and shoplifting offences, and without a car.
“Organised” group of offenders were identified. These could be identified at the scene because they left a clean, but forced entry, had brought tools to the scene, did not leave evidence behind, and took high value items that would often need a ‘fence’ to dispose of. These offenders tended to be older, specialize in burglary, cohabit or have a partner, and have a car.
Using the typology, police crime analysts were able to draw up lists of potential suspects. This strategy increased the arrest rate to three times that of a control site. A substantial improvement in this difficult-to-solve crime.
Why might it not work?
Victim responds in different ways Alison et al. (2002) points out offender’s and victim’s aims are diametrically opposed
Alison et al. point out there is what they call a “personality paradox” in offender profiling.
Based on Bem & Allen (1974) who state that individuals are prone to infer stable dispositions from individuals’ behaviour.
Environment changes
Offender may change (cf Davies, 1998)
May not have access to the important data (e.g., how the individual behaves)
Alison et al. (2002)
global trait constructs have failed to predict behaviour across specific situations.
Nevertheless, Alison et al. state that evidence has consistently shown that global trait constructs have failed to predict behaviour across specific situations.
Bandwidth-fidelity trade off:
- -abstract (e.g., conscientious) may predict but only generally across a number of domains.
- -Specific (e.g., punctuality) may be useful for predicting punctuality but little else.
Mokros & Alison (2002)
100 British stranger rapists.
These individuals were then indexed with respect to the similarity of their crime scene actions
Mokros & Alison (2002)
offender behaviour %s
Disguise 15.8%
Spends time after assault 21.6%
Inquisitive 25.2%
Blindfold 16.5%
Gagging 17.3%
Kisses 41.7%
Anal 18.0%
Weapon 54.7%
Vaginal 82.7%
Apologises 13.0%
