Profiling in Policy and Practice

David Canter, Laurence Alison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138276765
• eBook ISBN: 9781351908566
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

'Profilers' and 'Profiling' are now widely discussed, often with almost mythical respect. This is the first volume to cut through the confusions and misunderstandings surrounding this topic to report on detailed, original, scientific research that examines the variations in criminal behaviour from which any 'profile' must be derived. The studies included examine both early approaches to the field and the future problems and potential for an Investigative Psychology approach of offender profiling. This book will be of great value to all those who have been waiting for a scientific, psychological basis to police investigations. It will be read with interest by those who want to get behind the rhetoric and controversy that surrounds 'offender profiling' and require an up to date account of current research and recent discoveries.

1 Profiling in Policy and Practice

LAURENCE ALISON AND DAVID CANTER

The term ‘profiler’ has commonly been applied to the media hungry defintion of a sole individual responsible for solving an offence where others have failed. This chapter extends the meaning to any individual or self professed ‘expert’ who has attempted to explain the motivations of others and categorise certain details of their backgrounds. This may include clients within therapy, suspects within a police enquiry or assessments of the likely motives and qualities that lie behind different written texts. In expanding the term this chapter explores the extent to which profiling has been abused. Where the area has been redolent with poor policy and practice we attempt to outline an alternative to the scenario of the lonely expert contributing to the enquiry. This involves closer liaison with and education of the individuals relevant to the enquiry and of conceptual and empirically derivable hypotheses appropriate to developing systematic and replicable models of behaviour set within a social science framework.

Laurence John Alison is currently employed as a lecturer at the Centre for Investigative Psychology at the University of Liverpool. Dr Alison is developing models to explain the processes of manipulation, influence and deception that are features of criminal investigations. His research interests focus upon developing rhetorical perspectives in relation to the investigative process and he has presented many lectures both nationally and internationally to a range of academics and police officers on the problems associated with offender profiling. He is currently working on false allegations of sexual assault and false memory. He is affiliated with The Psychologists at Law Group – a forensic service specialising in providing advice to the courts, legal professions, police service, charities and public bodies.

David Canter is Director of the Centre for Investigative Psychology at the University of Liverpool. He has published widely in Environmental and Investigative Psychology as well as many areas of Applied Social Psychology. His most recent books since his award winning “Criminal Shadows.” have been “Psychology in Action” and with Laurence Alison “Criminal Detection and the Psychology of Crime.”

1 Profiling in Policy and Practice

LAURENCE ALISON AND DAVID CANTER¹

The trouble also is that we as analysts apparently cannot resist the seductiveness of being directly helpful.

Brian Bird (1972, p. 286)

This volume is concerned with the variety of account giving processes within the domain of ‘profiling’. This can be in relation to giving an account of the likely characteristics of an offender from an assessment of the crime scene, a therapist’s assessment of the root of a client’s disorders or the presentation of material in a court of law.

There seems to be reluctance for the media to relinquish fully the notion that psychologists can provide some special insight into the human mind. This is especially true when the actions being examined involve rape and murder. With a morbid fascination reminiscent of the attitudes to freak shows, there appears to be an inability to resist the desire to probe into the darker recesses of the more bizarre features of criminal behaviour. ‘Experts’ are commonly credited by the press with almost mythical powers of deduction if they appear to have contributed to police investigations and there appears to be a strong relationship between the presumed powers of the expert and the bizarre nature of the offence. Needless to say, scant attention is paid to the process by which these ‘deductions’ are made, or to the limitations of such offerings.

This volume in the Offender Profiling Series demonstrates that whilst psychologists may be relatively powerless to kerb the media’s inappropriate image of the expert, exclusive focus on product over process makes for poor policy decisions and poor practice.

An obsession only with outcome rather than acquiring an understanding of the limitations and processes by which answers were derived is an understandably urgent concern for the police, courts, clients in therapy and for the psychologists themselves: offenders need to be caught, jurors need to make clear decisions, clients want to understand the route of their problems and psychologists need to feel they have helped. However, in such cases these issues are rarely so black and white simply because the questions asked are often complicated and multi faceted.

Consider, for example, the construction of an offender profile. Conditions under which any single offence has been committed often have features relatively unique to that case. Moreover, information is often partial, potentially inaccurate and/or irrelevant and as discussed in Canter and Alison’s (1999) ‘Interviewing and Deception’, errors early on in an enquiry can compound subsequent misguided interpretations. Thus, before reliable assumptions of an individual’s background characteristics may be given, the purification of the information collection process must be prioritised. Neither statistically nor clinically produced profiles are immune from the ramifications of such ‘muddy’ information. Moreover, the interaction between expert and inquiry team is prone to social processes of influence that may degrade or misrepresent the information.

Offender profilers are never produced under closely controlled laboratory experiments. Experts consult with an enquiry team who have their own opinions and agendas. Thus the opinions given regarding the characteristics of the offender may be profoundly shaped by the nature of the interaction between police and psychologist. Even if such material is subject to empirical test subsequent to these interactions there is still room for error because of the nature of the material and because it has not been collected in an unsullied way purely for research purposes.

Similar processes of distortion may arise in a therapist’s ‘profile’ of a client. Although there may be a desire to help the individual find a cause for their problems as soon as possible, during the course of such intense, close knit interactions there is a potential for subtle processes of influence and persuasion to occur. There exists the possibility for the therapist and client jointly to construct increasingly detailed and potentially artificial ‘explanations’ for depression, eating disorders or drug abuse. Having helped to construct these accounts, subsequent challenges to them may be met with very powerful resistance – particularly if this new found explanatory role satisfies the client’s search for a causal explanation for their present state. Thus both in the therapist’s interaction with the client and the profiler’s interaction with the inquiry there is a strong likelihood that reciprocal persuasion distorts in the joint accounts constructed.

Our concern lies in exploring the fundamental problem for practitioners that arises in cases where there is uncertainty or lack of clarity in understanding the nature of the process by which opinions were given.

Ultimately, these opinions arise in the courtroom, where certainty has to be established beyond reasonable doubt. This volume therefore also serves as a guideline and warning for what might be expected in court if an opinion on the likely characteristics of an offender is offered. As the chapters in this volume illustrate many of the psychological issues that are finding their way into courtrooms concern highly contentious and controversial issues that psychologists simply cannot be certain of and in many of these cases the explanations for their opinions are less than satisfactory. These accounts include whether to accept the testimony of an individual who has recovered memories of sexual abuse, whether an offender profile might ever be used by the prosecution or the defence to implicate or exonerate a suspect and whether strategies of interviewing inappropriately influenced the discourse of a witness/suspect. In relation to these issues, the volume examines the nexus of contacts between psychologists and police officers, the clients under psychologists’ care as well as the relationship that psychologists have with the courts when they must disclose the details of these interactions within the witness box as an expert witness.

The Absence of Psychology in Psychological Profiling

‘Offender Profiling’ is commonly associated with inferring characteristics of an offender from the actions at a crime scene. However, we employ the term more loosely in this volume to refer to those instances where characteristics of the offence and offender may be inferred from other sorts of information. For example, a psychologist may accuse a client’s parents of abuse based on information that the client revealed in therapy; a murderous motive may be inferred from what otherwise might have been presumed a suicide in the case of an equivocal death, or inferences about the likely characteristics of an extortionist may be based upon a letter known to be made by the offender. In each case, the psychologist is reconstructing information about the likely sequence of events and characteristics of the person presumed to be involved in that offence from a wide array of information (accounts from a client, witness details surrounding a death, various linguistic features of extortion letters). Our concern throughout the volume lies within the legitimacy of making those inferences based on an examination of the processes by which they are made. As the other authors and we illustrate many of these processes, whilst presented with great conviction are, at the moment, highly contentious. They are often little more than, at best, subjective opinion, common sense or ignorance or at worst, deliberate deception.

Offender Profilers

Although, as stated, the advice that profilers give comes in many forms, the most popularly promulgated ‘success’ stories of these experts concerns their power to infer characteristics of offenders from an analysis of crime scene behaviours. As pointed out in chapter one, despite evidence to suggest that current profiling methods are little more than subjective opinion (albeit informed by experience), the notion of an expert profiler, who is able to succeed where the police have failed appears to be a myth that our culture is unable to shake off.

Many of the individuals who are considered the ‘old masters’ of profiling have produced accounts of their successes in the form of autobiographies. Whilst we do not deny their considerable experience of working on such cases, and the possibility that the sheer number of cases they have worked on may stand them in good stead to give an informed opinion, a careful examination of the content of their profiles reveals a severe lack in the accounts of any systematic procedures or any substantive, theoretical models of behaviour. There is no reference to any commonly accepted psychological principles – pathological or social. Why is there such an absence of any principles of psychology in these accounts? Of course, it is possible that individuals wish to avoid such dry academic references in order to appeal to popular audiences, but the promotion of such an intuitive and yet allegedly successful outlook on profiling is misleading both for students who wish to study the psychology of criminal behaviour, for law enforcement officers and for other professionals who may harbour unrealistic expectations. The gross misrepresentation of psychology portrayed in these accounts should be of particular concern for any professional psychologist. Such misrepresentation is an ethical concern. In the Codes of Conduct, Ethical Principles and Guidelines of the British Psychological Society, the Code states in section 3.3 ‘Obtaining consent’ that psychologists must:

refrain from making exaggerated, sensational and unjustifiable claims for the effectiveness of their methods and products, from advertising services or products in a way likely to encourage unrealistic expectations about the effectiveness of the services or products offered, or from misleading those to whom services are offered about the nature and likely consequences of any interventions to be undertaken.

It is rare for an individual who has published their memoir’s to outline inaccurate and unsuccessful profiles. Are we to assume that these individuals are immune from error? That their atheoretical accounts that ignore any psychological model, paradigm, theory or approach to social science are a product of their own unique powers? Certainly the picture that they present presumes such infallibility. Their accounts invariably involve cases that the author can refer to in a favourable light and in protean fashion they can deftly cover up any inconsistencies by the interpretation of events and their own successes that they present. An example is the profiler who, on realising that he underestimated the age of the offender by over ten years re-interpreted this inaccuracy as a result of the offender’s incarceration for 8 years. The profiler re-interpreted this inaccuracy by stating that the offender was socially stunted by ten years.

The style of such accounts are often engaging, almost evangelical in tone with references to the ways in which the profiler, wandering around the crime scene can proselytise hardened Detectives into the conviction in the expert’s ability to ‘get inside’ the offender’s mind. The profiler’s experiential acumen elevates him above any ‘normal’ Detective and any approach that deviates from this ‘gut feeling’ is perceived as inferior and unlikely to bear fruit. For example, in Douglas’ (1997) account of a murder in which he correctly insisted the offender must be white despite a Negroid hair being found at the crime scene, he replied when asked how he could account for his conviction, “I couldn’t, but I was right to stand by it”. These accounts bear some striking similarities to the advice psychics might give to an enquiry team. Both are based on nothing but feelings – systematic observations and procedures are discouraged in favour of instinct and intuition. By his own admission Douglas admits that a Detective stated, “We had a psychic in here a couple of weeks ago and she said just about the same things”. A closer examination of Douglas’ profiles, with all the rhetoric surrounding the account stripped away, reveals startling simplicity to many of the conclusions. In the majority of cases what one might refer to as a ‘basic’ profile is laid down that includes elements very likely to represent the general characteristics of offenders convicted for serious crimes of violence – namely ‘has problems with women’, ‘lives in area of the crime’, ‘has few close relationships’ and ‘has previous convictions’. Douglas occasionally makes assertions regarding characteristics that he feels are unlikely to be present. These ‘accurate non occurrences’ are often low base rate characteristics that are very likely not going to be a feature in such populations – i.e. no military experience. Thus Douglas thinks he is gaining additional points by telling us what is not going to appear as a characteristic. Added to this are characteristics that are very difficult or impossible to test directly: ‘low frustration level’, ‘unable to accept defeat’, ‘unsure of himself. Occasionally, seemingly startlingly specific and accurate assessments are added – for example that the offender would have a speech impediment. Of course, we are not told whether any other very specific characteristics given were ever incorrect.

Similar features are present in Britton’s (1997) ‘The Jigsaw Man’. Britton uses an additional device to help convince the audience of his profiling expertise – he presents points as separate though they are clearly related. For example in stating that an individual is sexually immature also implies he has few if any previous girlfriends. However, Britton is able to give the impression that these are two separate points merely by separating them by another point in a list of characteristics. It is perhaps more surprising, given that Britton has had some training in forensic psychology, that nowhere in Britton’s account are there any references to psychological principles or any indication of a process by which he has come to his conclusions. Thus despite an advert for Britton’s book that boasts, ‘If you did it he’ll get you’ we are no clearer by the end of the book of how ‘he will get you’.

Whether one advocates such intuitive personal opinion or not it is certainly the case that such types of advice have not progressed our knowledge of offender behaviour in over one hundred years. As Canter pointed out a number of years ago (Canter 1994) and we develop in chapter two such opinions have barely moved forward from the days of Dr. Thomas Bond who in 1888 provided a profile of Jack the Ripper. Indeed, Dr. Bond’s profile may be said to include more psychological references than current examples since he refers to diagnostic terms that were held at the time to be pathological variants of behaviour. This is at least an approach to a process of giving advice:

The character of the mutilations indicate that the man may be in a condition sexually that may be called Satyriasis.

(Fr. Donald Rumbelow, The Complete Jack the Ripper 1987, p. 140–141)

One must seriously question then whether psychologists wish to portray themselves as individuals with special knowledge, not borne of education or of learning but merely of flair and intuition. Perhaps some individuals have a feeling for issues within psychology and may be more creative in their generation of competing hypotheses. They may also have ability more readily to anticipate what might be at the heart of a problem. However, even if there are such gifted individuals should they be at liberty to ignore the parameters of the scientific framework within which they work? Flair alone is not sufficient when judgements are likely to influence serious decisions across an investigation and within a court of law. We have to ask whether we would prefer a poet or a scientist to represent us in court.

The second c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Profiling in Policy and Practice
• 2 Professional, Legal and Ethical Issues in Offender Profiling
• 3 Mobsters are Human Too
• 4 Social Science Perspectives on the Analysis of Investigative Interviews
• 5 False Allegations of Child Sexual Abuse
• 6 Equivocal Death
• 7 Approaches to the Scientific Attribution of Authorship
• 8 Psychologists as Expert Witnesses
• 9 Criminal Profiling: Trial by Judge and Jury, not Criminal Psychologist