Profiling: Bottom-Up Approach Flashcards
What is offender profiling (in general)?
A behavioural and analytical tool that is intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile characteristics of unknown criminals.
What are the two major parts of the bottom-up approach?
Investigative psychology and Geographical profiling.
What is forensic awareness?
The idea that certain behaviours may reveal an awareness of particular police techniques and past experiences.
What is investigative psychology?
A form which matches details from the crime scene with statistical analysis of typical offender behaviour patterns based on psychological theory.
What is meant if an offender is expressive impulsive?
They are uncontrolled, in the heat of strong emotions, they may feel provoked by the victim.
What is geographical profiling?
Profiling based on the principle of spatial consistency: the idea that an offender’s operational base can be revealed by locations of their previous crimes.
What is meant if an offender is Instrumental opportunistic?
‘instrumental’ means using murder to obtain or accomplish something. ‘opportunistic’ meaning the offender took the easiest opportunity.
Who developed investigative psychology?
Canter (1944).
What are the two models of offender profiling proposed in offender profiling?
The marauder and the commuter.
Interpersonal coherence is central to investigative psychology, what is Interpersonal coherence?
The idea that people are consistent with their behaviours and therefore, there will be links with elements of the crime and their everyday life.
Salfati and Canter (1999) found what using smallest space analysis?
They analyses the co-occurrence of 48 crime scenes and were able to identify three underlying themes:
- Instrumental opportunistic
- Instrumental cognitive
- Expressive impulsive
Who proposed the circle theory in geographical profiling?
Canter and Larkin, (1993).
What is meant if an offender is Instrumental cognitive?
A particular concern about being detected and therefore the crime is more planned.
Give an example of how forensic awareness can be used during profiling.
Davies (1997) found that rapists who conceal fingerprints often had previous burglary convictions.
What is smallest space analysis?
A statistical technique which he developed to find correlations between crime scenes and offender characteristics.
What does CGT stand for?
Criminal Geographic Targeting.
What is CGT?
A computerised system which creates a 3D map displaying spatial data related to time, distance, and movement to and from crime scenes (a jeopardy surface).
Who was the first to describe the technique of geographical profiling?
Kim Rossmo (1997).
Who developed CGT?
Rossmo.
What is a jeopardy surface?
A map created by the CGT system.
What is a marauder?
A person who operates in close proximity to their home base.
What is the function of a jeopardy map?
It helps investigators to make educated guesses on where the offender will strike next.
What is a commuter?
A person who is likely to have travelled a distance away from their usual residence.
AO3 - Evidence for Investigative psychology.
Canter and Heritage (1990) conducted a content analysis (qualitative) of 66 sexual assault cases, the data was examined using smallest space analysis. Several characteristics were identified as common in most cases and these characteristics occurred in different patterns in different individuals. This supports the usefulness of investigative psychology as it shows the application of statistical techniques.
