Criminal Profiling

1.1 Introduction

1.2 Method

Criminal Profiling
 Belief that you can tell something about the offender, their
characteristics, by a careful and considered examination of the offence.
 After a crime has been commited you use all the information that you can
gather about the crime.
 For example, details about the crime:
a. What occurred.
b. Where it occurred.
c. Information either from or about the victim.
 Use this to draw up a profile of the characteristics of
the person who most likely commited the crime.
 Information:
a. Demographic features
b. Age
c. Gender
d. Ethnicity
 Depending on the approach, this profile might include information
on the perpetrator’s likely motivativation.
o Motivation of the perpetrators:
 Why are they engaging in this behaviour?
 Why did the crime take place when and where it did?
 Offender profiling is typically used in serious crimes like murder and
in serial crimes, and also when it is difficult to identify the offender
using standard methods.
 Approaches
A. FBI’s Criminal Investigative Analysis.
 This approach was initially developed at the FBI academy in
Virginia and the later in the Behavioral Science Unit. It came
about through an increasing awareness amongst investigators that
apprehended offenders, who had been identified using traditional
investigation techniques, appeared to share characteristics and
exhibit particular patterns of behaviour at their crime scenes.

 Is it possible to get clues from the crime scene and the

surviving victims that would give the investigators the
most probable personality and demographic characteristics
of the offender?
 This would be useful, as it would allow the
investigators to focus their attention on the most
likely offenders rather than having to investigate a
very large pool of suspect.
 They started by drawing on their own officers experience in the
investigation of serious sexual assault and murder, and they also
carried out in-depth interviews with small number of convicted
sexual murderers who volunteered. But bearing in mind that these
Murderers memories for their crimes were unlikely to be perfect,
 and that convicted volunteers may not be representtative of the
broader category of murderers.
 However, the aim of these activities was to identify
the major personality and behavioural characteristics
that this type of offender had. And, critically, how
the personality seen in this type of offender differed
from that typically seen in the general population.

B. Investigative Psychology (Commonly associated with David Canter).
C. Diagnostic evaluation
D. Crime Action Profiling (recently developed).
Within these approaches you also have specialities if you like, that
focus on one element.Example, geographical profiling is often used in an
attempt to locate where the offender is based given his or her offending
locations. So what we’re going to do is consider just a few of these.
Those where more has been written about the approaches that they take.
 3.34
1.3 Are Professional Profilers Better?
1.4 Investigative Psychology
1.5 Geographic Profiling