Offender Profiling and Crime Analysis

Peter Ainsworth

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135995102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Offender Profiling and Crime Analysis provides a highly readable account of the subject, and a picture of profiling which by no means accords with popular views and representations of what is involved. The book provides an overview of profiling techniques, offering some fascinating insights into the various approaches to profiling, and schools of thought, which have emerged ? looking particularly at the work of the FBI, and of British and Dutch profilers.

Chapter 1

Offender profiling – separating myth from reality

Offender profiling has been the subject of great media and public interest in recent years. Just why this should be the case is not immediately obvious. As we noted in the preface, many people have an interest in human behaviour in general, but understanding the behaviour of criminals appears to add an extra level of curiosity. The number of books, films and television programmes which deal with crime-related matters continues to grow year by year. Courses in criminology and psychology also attract increasing numbers of students.

For many people it is the solving of a serious crime by a shrewd, albeit fictional detective that makes for compulsive reading or viewing. In many profiling cases, the ingredients of a good detective story are already present. In most instances, the case will be one of a serious nature and the (unknown) perpetrator will appear to be a menacing and illusive figure. Alongside these already ‘attractive’ ingredients we have, in the case of profiling, the opportunity for some individual to employ his or her knowledge of psychology to help solve an otherwise baffling case. Given these ingredients, the level of interest in profiling is perhaps understandable. However, as we will see in this chapter, many who are fascinated by what they understand to be profiling may have an inaccurate picture of profiling techniques.

Some academic commentators have questioned whether profiling is based upon intuition and guesswork, or upon scientific objectivity. Throughout this volume we will see that there is a fundamental disagreement between those practitioners who consider profiling to be an art, and those who wish to portray it as a science. Those from the former camp are likely to write in glowing terms of their own abilities and intuitions and can easily convince the reader that very few individuals have the necessary talent or creative mind which profiling appears to require. Those from the opposing camp may scoff at such suggestions and argue that anyone who uses appropriate techniques can assist an enquiry. The problem in trying to understand what profiling entails is compounded when profilers do not offer up their methods for scrutiny or debate.

There is a great deal of public misunderstanding about what profiling involves. Much of this misunderstanding stems from fictional television series including Cracker, Millennium, and Profiler and from films such as Manhunter and Silence of the Lambs. Television series such as Cracker may have served to popularise the subject of offender profiling in Britain but may also have created a misleading impression of what profiling can achieve and the methods that it uses.

In many cases the reality of profiling work is somewhat different from the myths portrayed by the media. It will be seen throughout this book that profiling has great appeal as a technique, and is a subject of great fascination to the lay-person. Fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes may perceive some similarities in the methods which Holmes used and those employed by his modern-day counterpart. Certainly the careful examination of a crime scene in an effort to understand something of the offender’s motivation is mirrored in many contemporary profilers’ work. However, the next step in the process (in which Holmes would rely to some extent on intuition) may well differ.

One of the major debates in the profiling area is whether the drawing up of a profile is a ‘scientific’ endeavour or more a case of educated (or in some cases uneducated) guesswork. The telling moment in which Sherlock Holmes solves the crime, turns to his assistant and announces that it is ‘elementary, my dear Watson’ is dramatic and fascinating for the reader or viewer. However, a modern-day profiler who made such leaps of faith, unsupported by any apparent empirical basis, would have little credibility. The reader may wish to note that even legendary figures such as Sherlock Holmes are not infallible. In Holmes’s first case (A Study in Scarlet) Holmes was wrong about the identity of a visitor, and his premature retirement from detective work appears to have been prompted at least partly by his poor handling of another case. As forensic or investigative psychology develops and refines its techniques it is to be hoped that its scientific credibility will increase and go well beyond the sort of deductions made by Sherlock Holmes and many of his modern-day fictional counterparts.

Is there consensus on what constitutes profiling?

The field of profiling is currently so fragmented and rife with conflicting views and opinions, that it is difficult for the student to understand, let alone assess the status of the discipline. Turvey (1999) notes that profilers are often reluctant to disclose their exact methods, either because of fears of plagiarism of their ideas, or because their methods may be questioned if not criticised or ridiculed by others. As the reader will see in chapters 6, 7 and 8, profilers on either side of the Atlantic often disagree as to the most suitable methods to be used in their work. Furthermore, even profilers in the same country may have fundamental disagreements about the best way in which knowledge might be advanced. Nowhere is this more evident than in the exchanges between Britain’s two best known ‘profilers’, Paul Britton and David Canter. In one recent review, Copson and Marshall (1999) suggest that many profiles are so idiosyncratic as to be indivisible from the identity of the profiler.

What does profiling involve?

Because profiling is often misunderstood it would be useful to consider what it entails. At the heart of most profiling is the belief that characteristics of an offender can be deduced by a careful and considered examination of the characteristics of the offence. In other words profiling generally refers to the process of using all the available information about a crime, a crime scene, and a victim, in order to compose a profile of the (as yet) unknown perpetrator. However, as Gudjonnson and Copson (1997: 67) note, there is little common basis for the process of profiling and furthermore, ‘different profilers have their own idiosyncratic approaches to cases’. Some have sought to make a distinction between approaches which are essentially deductive, and those which are inductive although such a division is not always straightforward (Tamlyn, 1999: 250).

Profiling is most often used in those crimes in which the police have few clues to help in solving the case and are even unsure as to the type of individual whom they should be seeking. Profiling has been most often employed in the investigation of rape and murder, especially where these crimes appear to form part of a series.

It is important to point out from the outset that profiling’s aim is not to be able to tell the police exactly who committed a certain crime. Rather, as we will see throughout this volume, profiling is about making predictions as to the most probable characteristics that a perpetrator is likely to possess. Furthermore, the construction of a profile is just one aspect of the help which a psychologist might offer to the investigating team. (See chapter 8.)

We have chosen to use the term offender profiling throughout this book, though the reader should note that the techniques are often referred to under different names. These include commonly used terms such as criminal profiling and psychological profiling but also less well known descriptions such as crime scene analysis, crime scene profiling, profile analysis, behavioural profiling, criminal personality profiling, statistical profiling and investigative psychology. The term also encompasses geographic profiling (Rossmo, 1997) which will be discussed in chapter five. Although many of these terms are used interchangeably, in some cases the different nomenclatures point to different approaches and emphases. (See for example Homant and Kennedy, 1998.)

As was noted above, profiling has most often been used in the investigation of serious crimes including, in particular, serial rapes and murders and, to a lesser extent, arson. The reason for the concentration on these types of crime is threefold.

First, these crimes, whilst relatively infrequent, are particularly heinous and will cause great anxiety amongst the population. As such there will be calls for the swift capture and incarceration of this particularly disturbing type of offender. Despite the fact that most violent assaults take place between individuals who are already acquainted, many people live in fear of an unprovoked attack by a stranger. For this reason the sort of offences for which profiling is most likely to be considered are those offences which command the most media coverage and thus the most public anxiety.

Second, crimes of this type (which invariably involve attacks on a stranger) are difficult to solve by traditional police methods. In most crimes of murder, for example, the police will not need to look beyond the victim’s family or friends in order to solve the crime – the vast majority of such crimes will have been committed by a family member or associate. In the case of attacks on strangers, the pool of possible suspects will be considerably greater and the police investigation invariably more protracted.

Third, and perhaps most interestingly from a psychological perspective, is the fact that these ‘contact crimes’ are believed to be the ones in which aspects of an offender’s underlying personality and motivations are most likely to be revealed by the way in which an offence or series of offences has been carried out. This is one reason why traditional profiling techniques are thought to be of limited use in the investigation of much high-volume crime such as minor theft and burglary.

What do ‘profiles’ look like?

It may be helpful at this point to provide an illustration of the technique of profiling. The first case to be discussed is one of the earliest examples of the use of profiling in Britain. It involved the case of the so-called railway rapist, John Duffy. Duffy had committed a series of rapes and three murders in the Greater London area between 1983 and 1986. The police resources devoted to the task of solving these crimes were enormous, yet little real progress had been made in the hunt for the attacker. David Canter eventually became involved in the case, though as he notes in his book (Canter, 1994: ch. 2) this involvement came about almost by chance. Canter had little to go on in terms of where to start, yet he used a number of psychological principles and sifted through the massive amount of data that the police had accumulated. He eventually amalgamated his thoughts to produce a profile of the sort of individual whom he felt the police should be looking for (Canter, 1994: 39–40).

Canter suggested that the assailant would have lived in the area circumscribed by the first three cases since 1983; possibly have been arrested some time after 24 October 1983; probably lived in that area at the time of arrest; and probably lived with his wife or girlfriend, quite possibly without children.

Canter further suggested that the attacker was in his mid to late 20s, had light hair, was about 5’9”, right-handed, and an ‘A secretor’. (This latter term refers to the fact that some individuals secrete their blood group into their body fluids. In this case, forensic investigation showed that the perpetrator was a ‘secretor’ and that he had Blood Group A.)

In terms of the offender’s employment, Canter suggested that he probably had a semi-skilled or skilled job involving weekend work or casual labour from about June 1984. He also predicted that this job would probably not bring the assailant into much contact with the public.

In terms of the assailant’s character, Canter predicted that the individual would tend to be a person who kept himself to himself but who had one or two close male friends. It was also suggested that the individual would have little contact with women especially in the work situation. Canter suggested further that the attacker would have a detailed knowledge of the railway system around which the attacks took place.

With regard to his sexual history, it was predicted that the person would have had considerable experience of sexual activity prior to the attacks. Canter also suggested that the person was probably under arrest at some time between 24 October 1982 and January 1984. Canter believed, perhaps surprisingly, that his arrest may not have been for a sex-related matter but may have been linked to an aggressive attack, possibly while under the influence of alcohol.

Despite the fact that Canter, by his own admission, was sailing largely in uncharted waters here, many of his predictions proved to be remarkably accurate. Looking through the profile one can see that some of the details appear to have been derived directly from the case files and needed little in the way of psychological interpretation. However, many of the other factors were the result of analyses of patterns in the evidence and also from the introduction of psychological theories of behaviour.

Canter presumed that some of what he said would be so obvious to the police that it would add little to their knowledge, but in some respects this turned out not to be the case. For example, he presumed that his prediction about the attacker living within the area bounded by the first three attacks would have already been obvious to the police, yet this appeared not to be so.

Canter’s information allowed the police to focus their attention on those individuals who matched his predictions. John Duffy was one such individual. Duffy had already appeared on a list of suspects compiled by the police, but unfortunately his name was one amongst (literally) thousands of others. Partly because of his similarity to Canter’s profile, the police decided to mount an observation on Duffy and he was eventually arrested and charged with the attacks. It should be noted that the police in this case used the profile in order to narrow down their list of possible suspects, rather than as ‘proof’ that Duffy was the perpetrator. This was important for, as noted above, Duffy was just one of a very large number of possible suspects upon whom the police might have decided to concentrate their efforts.*

We will be returning to the example of the railway rapist as a way of illustrating many of the points which are to be made in relation to profiling. Whilst this real-life example shows that in some cases profiling can be of great benefit, we should not assume that the results are always so dramatically successful. Unfortunately the reader who studies books written by profilers may go away with the impression that these individuals are invariably correct. Whilst some high profile cases have been solved at least partially by the insights offered by profilers, such individuals do make mistakes and in some cases their errors can hamper or harm an investigation.

We will return to this latter point later in the chapter but for now we will consider another example of a profile which did prove to be helpful. This was the first profile provided by Paul Britton, one of the UK’s best known ‘criminal psychologists’.

Britton had been approached by the police in Leicestershire and asked if he could help to make sense of a rather unusual murder case. (A fuller discussion is provided in chapter 8.) The murder was that of a 33-year-old woman by the name of Caroline Osborne. When the police discovered Caroline’s body they found that her hands and feet had been bound with twine and that she had been stabbed seven times. There were no signs of robbery or of a sexual assault but near the body was a piece of paper which contained a drawing of a pentagram in a circle. This is an image often associated with satanic or black magic rituals. Britton examined photographs of the crime scene and of the post-mortem examination and tried to make sense of the murderer’s actions and his choice of victim. Britton describes how he eventually produced the profile. ‘Folding a foolscap page, I began writing down a list of psychological features that I could draw from the material.’ (Britton, 1997: 50)

Britton suggested that the killer was a very young man in his mid-teens to early twenties. He predicted that he would be a very lonely figure, sexually immature and have had few if any previous girlfriends. Britton suggested that whilst the killer would have wanted relationships he would not possess the necessary social skills to begin or maintain them. Furthermore he predicted that the individual would probably live at home with his parents or one parent.

Britton went on to suggest that the murderer would be likely to be a manual worker with ‘the sort of job that demands dexterity and m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Offender profiling – separating myth from reality
• 2 Criminal behaviour and its motivation
• 3 Environmental influences and patterns of offending
• 4 Problems and pitfalls in the gathering of data
• 5 Crime mapping and geographical profiling
• 6 Early approaches to profiling
• 7 Investigative psychology and the work of David Canter
• 8 Clinical and other approaches
• 9 Current developments and future prospects
• Conclusions
• References
• Index