Offender Profiling Flashcards
What is offender profiling?
an investigative tool employed by the police when solving crimes
What is the aim of offender profiling?
to create an idea of the offender’s likely characteristics helping the police focus their resources on more likely suspects, and can create new leads within an investigation
What are the different styles of approach in offender profiling?
Top Down Approach
Bottom Up Approach
What is the top down approach (typology approach) (douglas) to profiling?
where evidence from the crime scene and other details of the crime/victim/context are used to fit
into pre-existing categories of either organised or disorganised offender.
What are the types of offenders?
Organised and Disorganised
What are the features organised offenders?
-crime tends to be planned
-victim is specifically targeted - the killer often has a ‘type’
-maintain a high degree of control during the crime and leave little evidence behind at the crime scene.
-offenders generally high in intelligence, socially and sexually competent, usually live with a partner, have a car in good working order and follow their crimes in the media.
What are the features disorganised offenders?
-crime tends to be an unplanned
-random selection of victim suggesting the offence may have been spontaneous
-very little control during the crime and is often impulsive. The body/evidence is usually left at the crime scene.
- tend to have a lower than average
IQ be in unskilled work or unemployed and often have a history sexual dysfunction and failed relationships.
They tend to live alone.
What was the top down approach a result of?
a result of work carried out by
the FBI in the 1970’s. They began by interviewing 36 convicted serial killers and sexually motivated murderers to gain an insight into their motives, thinking and behaviour
what are the four main stages in the construction of the top down profile?
-Data Assimilation
-Crime Scene classification
-Crime Reconstruction
-Profile Generation
What is data assimilation?
-Investigators gather together information from multiple sources. -includes a description of the crime scene (including photographs and sketches), background information about the victim (employment, habits, relationships) and details of the crime itself (weapon, cause of death autopsy report).
-All information, even if it appears trivial, should be included.
What is Crime scene classification?
-Profilers decide whether the crime scene represents an organised or disorganised offender dependent on the analysis of evidence from the crime scene.
What is crime reconstruction?
reconstructing the crime in order to develop predictions about the motives and behaviour of the offender/victim.
What is profile generation?
-profile is then constructed of the offender which includes hypotheses about the offender’s characteristics including likely background, personality, habits and physical appearance.
-This description is used to work out a strategy for the investigation to help catch the offender
What is the bottom up approach?
The bottom up approach to profiling originated in Britain and unlike top down approach they do not used fixed typologies, but instead the profile is ‘data driven’ using statistical databases.
How does the bottom of approach emerge?
-emerges as the investigator engages in deeper and more rigorous scrutiny of the details of the offence
-It is much more grounded in psychological theory than the top down approach
What is investigative psychology? (canter)
a form of bottom-up profiling that matches details from the crime
scene with statistical analysis of typical offender behaviour based on psychological theory
what is the aim of investigative psychology?
to -establish patterns of behaviour that are likely to occur – or co-exist across crime scenes.
-statistical ‘database’ is used which acts as a baseline for comparison.
-Specific details of an offence (or related offences) can then be matched against this database to reveal if a series of offences are linked and important details about the offender (such as their personal history, social background etc.).
What are the three main features to investigative psychology?
-Interpersonal coherence
-Time and place
-Forensic awareness
What is interpersonal coherence?
the way an offender acts at the
scene may reflect their behaviour in everyday situations.
What is time and place?
the time and location of an offender’s crime will communicate something about their own place of residence/employment
What is forensic awareness?
-Forensic awareness may reveal details of the offender.
-Offenders who show an awareness of forensic investigation
e.g. by covering their tracks will probably have committed a crime before and been through the criminal justice system.
What is geographical profiling?
a form of bottom up profiling which studies spatial behaviour which uses information about the location of linked crime scenes to make inferences about the likely home or operational base of an offender – known as crime mapping
What do geographical profilers focus on and why?
-Geographical profilers focus on the location of crime as clues to where offenders live, work and socialise.
-This is because it makes sense to assume that offenders are more likely to commit a crime near where they live or where they habitually travel to.
What is canter’s circle theory?
-it proposed that most offenders have a spatial mindset – they commit their crimes within a kind of imagined circle.
-he proposed two models of offender behaviour: the marauder and the commuter
