Offender Profiling: The Top-down Approach

Question 1

What is offender profiling?

Answer 1

A behavioural and analytical tool that is intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown offenders.

Question 2

What is the aim of offender profiling?

Answer 2

The aim is to narrow down the field of enquiry to a list of likely suspects.

Question 3

Why do professional profilers work alongside the police?

Answer 3

To generate a hypothesis as to who committed the crime.

Question 4

What is an offender profilers job?

Answer 4

Their job is to compile a profile about the offenders age, race, occupation, motives etc.

Question 5

What is the top-down approach?

Answer 5

Profilers start with a pre-established typology and work down in order to assign offenders into 1 or 2 categories based on witnesses accounts and evidence from a crime scene.

Question 6

When and who devised the top-down approach?

Answer 6

The FBI in the 1970’s.

Question 7

How did the FBI come up with the categories?

Answer 7

They utilised data gathered from 36 interviews of sexually motivated serial killers including Ted bundy and Charles Manson.

Question 8

What was the data from the FBI interviews categorised into?

Answer 8

-Organised
-Disorganised

Question 9

Why is it good that there are certain characteristics that future crime scenes can be compared to?

Answer 9

It helps to predict other characteristics and help find the offenders.

Question 10

What happens after the data is collected by the FBI?

Answer 10

Data is collected about the murder, then put into the category of either organised or disorganised.

Question 11

What are the main characteristics of an organised offender?

Answer 11

-Evidence of planning
-Target a specific victim
-Tend to be socially and sexually competent
-Higher than average intelligence (IQ)

Question 12

What are the main characteristics of a disorganised offender?

Answer 12

-Little evidence of planning
-Leaves clues
-Tends to be socially and sexually incompetent
-Lower than average intelligence

Question 13

What are “ways of working” known as?

Answer 13

Modus operandi

Question 14

What MO do organised offenders generally have?

Answer 14

-above average intelligence
-controlled even in the attack that looks frenzied
-In a skills/ professional job
-Mostly married with kids
-Well thought of in the community
-Organised about the attack (bring instruments/ escape plan etc)

Question 15

What MO do disorganised offenders generally have?

Answer 15

-Low skill job/ unemployed
-Social/ sexual issues
-Frenzied in attacks
-No real plan, impulsive attacks
-Probably has a criminal record
-Leaves clues at crime scene
-Lives close to the scene.

Question 16

What are the 4 steps to constructing an FBI profile?

Answer 16

1. Data assimilation
2. Crime scene classification
3. Crime reconstruction
4. Profile generation

Question 17

What is data assimilation?

Answer 17

Profiler reviews evidence from crime scene photos, pathology, reports etc.

Question 18

What is crime scene classification?

Answer 18

Either organised or disorganised.

Question 19

What is crime reconstruction?

Answer 19

Hypotheses (sequence of events).

Question 20

What is profile generation?

Answer 20

Hypothesis related to offender (e.g. age, social class, physical and behavioural characteristics).

Question 21

Write a PEEL paragraph a strength of the top-down approach?
(Research support)

Answer 21

P- Support for a distinct organised category.
E- Carter et al (2004) —> analysis of 100 US murders using smallest space analysis (statistic al technique that identifies correlations across different samples of behaviour) used to access co-occurrence of 39 aspects of serial killing.
E- Results were that there are a subset of features of serial killers that matches the FBI’s typology for organised offenders.
L- Suggests the top-down approach has some validity.

Question 22

Write a PEEL paragraph for a strength of the top-down approach?
(Wider application)

Answer 22

P- Top-down profiling can be adapted to different kinds of crimes.
E- Meketa (2017) —> that top-down approach has been used for burglary cases which lead to an 85% rise in solved cases in 3 US states.
E- detention method —> retains organised/ disorganised raised but adds 2 new categories; INTERPERSONAL (knows victim, takes trophy), OPPORTUNISTIC (usually inexperienced young offenders).
L- Suggests the top-down profiling has wider application than was originally assumed.

Question 23

Write a PEEL paragraph for a limitation of the top-down approach?
(Flawed evidence)

Answer 23

P- One limitation is the evidence it is based off.
E- FBI profiling was developed using interviews with 36 murders in the US (25 = serial killers, 11- single/ double murders). 24 of the murders were organised the other 12 were disorganised.
E- Carter et al (2004) —> sample was poor as did not select a random or large sample + no standard set of questions so answers weren’t comparable.
L- Suggests top down profiling doesn’t have sound-scientific evidence.