Offender Profiling

11 Key excerpts on "Offender Profiling"

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  Practical Psychology for Forensic Investigations and Prosecutions

  • Mark R. Kebbell, Graham M. Davies, Mark R. Kebbell, Graham M. Davies(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 8 Offender Profiling: Limits and Potential LAURENCE ALISON AND MARK R. KEBBELL

  Typically, the aim of an offender profile has been to determine an offender’s likely characteristics by analysing the way in which he or she committed a particular crime, thus helping the police to identify the perpetrator (Blau, 1994). For example, Douglas, Ressler, Burgess and Hartman (1986) describe Offender Profiling as “a technique for identifying the major personality and behavioral characteristics of an individual based upon an analysis of the crimes he or she has committed” (p. 405). Further, according to Pinizzotto and Finkel (1990), an offender profile “… focuses attention on individuals with personality traits that parallel traits of others who have committed similar offences” (p. 216). The aim of this chapter is to outline how offender profiles have, until very recently, been constructed, and to illustrate the theoretical underpinnings that these views have traditionally relied upon. This chapter will also evaluate the effectiveness of typical approaches to Offender Profiling, and identify the ways in which more recent developments have sought to improve the scientific status of profiles and their effectiveness.

  THE CONSTRUCTION OF OFFENDER PROFILES

  Many statements concerning Offender Profiling tend to attribute behaviours to underlying, relatively context-free dispositional traits of the offender. As is the case with traditional trait theories (Mischel, 1968), most forms of Offender Profiling make general predictions about offenders from their crime scene behaviours, assume that most offenders’ behaviours are affected in predictable ways and suggest that offenders’ behaviours remain stable in the face of different environmental influences (Alison, Bennell, Mokros & Ormerod, 2002).

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  Investigative Psychology

  Offender Profiling and the Analysis of Criminal Action

  • David V. Canter, Donna Youngs(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2 FOUNDATIONS 39 Psychiatric profiling Psychological profiling And various combinations of these. The confusion this plethora of terms causes is made worse by the fact that for some people it is a rather casual activity based on experience as ‘a method of identifying the perpetrator of a crime based on an analysis of the nature of the offense and the manner in which it was committed’ (Teton, 1995). Here the perpetrator is ‘identified’ and all that is needed is an examination of ‘the manner in which’ the offence is committed. There is no hint here of developing a description of the offender. The task is simply to identify him. Nor is there any explanation of how the offence is to be ‘examined’ or on what basis that examination can be fruitful. The emphasis here is on trying to identify the perpetrator when all that is available is the information from the crime scene. This is rather different from giving a description of what ‘makes a person tick’ as did Langer on Hitler. It also contrasts with John Faye’s description in The Police Dictionary and Encyclopaedia; Psychological profile: a description of the personality and characteristics of an individual based on an analysis of acts committed by the individual. The description may include age, race, sex, socio-economic and marital status, educational level, arrest history, location of residence relative to the scene of the act, and certain personality traits. A profile is based on characteristic patterns of uniqueness that distinguish certain individuals from the general population. Regarding criminal acts, patterns are deduced from thoughtful analysis of wounds, weapon used, cause of death, position of the body. (Fay, 1988: 271–2) Perhaps a little more poetically the process of making inferences about an unknown offender can be looked on as interpreting the psychological traces left at a crime. As Canter (1994: 4) puts it: A criminal may reveal what shoes he was wearing from his footprints.

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  Looking for Laura

  Public Criminology and Hot News

  • Wilson, David(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Waterside Press

    (Publisher)

  As Peter Ainsworth of the University of Manchester put it: Offender Profiling generally refers to the process of using all the available informa-tion about a crime, a crime scene, and a victim, in order to compose a profile of the (as yet) unknown perpetrator. While it is difficult to be precise about the actual origins of Offender Profiling, this premise was, to all intents and purposes, established in the 1970s within, and by, the FBI’s Behavioral Support Unit (BSU)— now known as the Investigative Support Unit (ISU)— which became famous through Thomas Harris’s books, and subsequent movie adaptions. However, it should be acknowledged that what might now be called “offender profiles” were constructed in 1956 by James Brussel in relation to the case of the “Con Edison” bomber in New York, and that Brussel subsequently wrote about his experiences in his 1968 autobiography Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist . So, too, Dr Robert Brittain — Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist at the Douglas Inch Clinic in Glasgow prior to his death in 1971 — who had a clinical inter-est in sadistic psychopathic killers, was asked by Glasgow CID to offer an opinion about the type of person they were seeking in the so-called “Bible John” murder case in the late 1960s. His subsequent paper, “The Sadistic Murderer “ (1970), remains the classic introduction to the subject, and can also be viewed as a profile. However, it is Brussel’s work which had the greatest influence on the FBI, so, for example, Howard Teten (who was a protégé of Brussel) helped estab-lish the bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit in 1972. Interestingly, Douglas was, in turn, a protégé of Teten. As The New Yorker columnist and author Malcolm Gladwell has recently written,“In the close-knit fraternity of profilers, [this] 154 Looking for Laura is like being analysed by the analyst who was analysed by Freud”.

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  Psychology and Crime

  • Francis Pakes, Jane Winstone(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  People can be forgiven for assuming that that is the reality of Offender Profiling. These myths are seductive and persistent. However, as we will see, the reality of profiling is much more mundane (Gudjonsson and Copson 1997; Ainsworth 2000). Profilers are more likely to liaise with police teams, rather than to work completely independently of them; the offenders they profile rarely, if ever, fit the Hannibal Lector stereotype, and, surprisingly often, profilers do not even produce a profile at all. That makes it pertinent to start from the beginning by defining profiling. Jackson and Bekerian (1997) define it as follows.

  A profile is assumed to involve the construction of a behavioural composite — a social and psychological assessment. A profile is based on the premise that the proper interpretation of crime scene evidence can indicate the personality type of the individual(s) who committed the offence. It is assumed that certain personality types exhibit similar behavioural patterns and that knowledge of these patterns can assist in the investigation of the crime and the assessment of potential suspects. (Jackson and Bekerian 1997: 3)

  It must be noted that, while the term ‘profiling’ is seemingly ubiquitous in the media, usage of the term is actually in decline in the field itself. Apart from Offender Profiling, the same processes, more or less, are referred to by terms such as ‘criminal profiling’, and ‘psychological profiling’, whereas there are types of profiling that are called ‘personality profiling’ and ‘geographic profiling’, and other profilers call their work ‘investigative psychology’ or ‘behavioural science analysis’. The key, though, is that they use information from the crime and the way in which it was committed to make predictions about the offender who carried it out. Often these crimes will be serious offences such as rape, murder or extortion. It has also been said that the crime needs to be of a certain emotive nature. Crimes that are purely acquisitive, such as burglary or bicycle theft, would not be suitable, as the offenders do not display any sort of individualised behaviour when committing them (Ainsworth 2000).

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  Forensic Psychology in Context

  Nordic and International Approaches

  • P.A. Granhag(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Willan

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 9 Offender Profiling Pekka Santtila

  Offender Profiling is usually taken to mean the prediction of offender characteristics on the basis of crime features. In the present chapter we also consider behavioural crime linking, that is the use of behavioural information to decide whether two offences have been committed by the same offender, and geographical profiling, that is the predicting of the home location of an offender on the basis of the locations where he or she has committed offences and any behavioural features associated with these crime scenes.

  Predicting offender characteristics

  Predicting the characteristics of an offender is a central aim in Offender Profiling. There has been controversy concerning the best way of reaching this aim. Some have suggested that such predictions are best made based on extensive investigative or clinical psychological experience whereas others have suggested that it is more effective to use a statistical approach in which the predictions are based on associations derived from a large number of solved offences (Canter, 2000). This is a false dichotomy as the statistical approach can be seen as a way of modelling a vast investigative experience. Many of the same issues and problems reviewed in more detail below affect both general approaches.

  A central issue for the prediction of offender characteristics is making a clear separation between the predictor and the predicted variables (Canter, 1995). The predictor variables are those that are available for the investigation prior to the offender having been caught. In the following these are called crime features and they also include, besides the actual behaviour exhibited by the offender at the crime scene, characteristics of the victim or other target as well as any circumstantial features related to time and place that are known at the outset of a police investigation. Also, the predicted variables should be objective and observable in order to be of use in the investigative process. For example, it is of no use for the police to know that the offender has ‘a deep-rooted hatred of women’ if that cannot be related to some observable feature that actually separates out potential suspects, for example having been previously arrested on a domestic violence charge. In most cases such a feature should be able to be used for sorting through archival material concerning several suspects. The fact that predicting intra-psychic features or psychiatric disorders of the offender is not likely to be useful also means that it is difficult to see how a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist would be able to provide useful advice in a criminal investigation. Instead, for example, predictions concerning the criminal background of an offender would be more directly useful in an investigation (Santtila et al.

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  Current Perspectives on Sex Crimes

  • Ronald M. Holmes, Stephen T. Holmes(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  1 The information that the criminal profiler uses is often taken from the scene of the crime and takes into account factors such as the state of the crime scene, what weapons (if any) were used in the crime, and what was done and said to the victim. Other information used in criminal profiling can include the geographic pattern of the crimes, how the offender got to and from the crime scene, and where the offender lives. The actual process of profiling dif-fers from one profiler to another (depending on the training of the profiler), but the aim remains the same: to deduce enough about the behavioral, personality, and physical char-acteristics of the perpetrator to catch him. 2 According to Holmes and Holmes (1996), psychological profiling has three major goals to provide the criminal justice system with the following information: a social and psychological assessment of the offender(s), a psychological evaluation of relevant posses-sions found with suspected offenders, and consultation with law enforcement officials on the strategies that should be used when interviewing offenders. Not all profiles involve all of these three aspects, with the role of the profiler usually being dictated largely by the needs of the law enforcement officials for whom he or she is consulting. Also, not all crimes are suitable for profiling. Holmes and Holmes state that profiling is only appropriate in cases in which the unknown offender shows signs of psychopathology or the crime is par-ticularly violent or ritualistic. Rape and arson are also considered by Holmes and Holmes to be good candidates for profiling. A profile will rarely by itself solve a crime or catch a criminal, but is designed to be an aid to the investigating police (Wilson & Soothill, 1996). The profile will rarely be so accu-rate as to suggest a certain individual as being responsible for the crime, but should point the police in the right direction and help reduce the possible number of subjects.

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  Police Psychology

  A New Specialty and New Challenges for Men and Women in Blue

  • David J. Thomas(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  8 The Psychology of Profiling INTRODUCTION Criminal profiling is a topic that has taken America by storm and has been glamorized by such shows as The Profiler and Criminal Minds. These shows allow the novice to obtain a glimpse into the criminal mind and participate in the excitement of the hunt. Finally, what the viewer gets is the satisfac- tion of catching the killer through a series of clues that can only be detected by the profiler. What television doesn’t provide are the skill sets necessary to become an effective profiler. As an investigator, a profiler is looking for a needle in a haystack, and the profiler does not possess extra sensory percep- tion as presented in some television shows or the movies. The skill sets to become an effective profiler are those of a criminal investigator, a psycholo- gist, a crime scene technologist, and a scientist. This chapter will attempt to demystify profiling and conclude by giving you an opportunity to apply your skills by analyzing three letters that I developed and use as training aids in my graduate courses. WHAT IS CRIMINAL PROFILING? Criminal profiling goes by many monikers: investigative psychology, crimi- nal profiling, psychological profiling, and Offender Profiling, yet each is dif- ferent in its own respect. However, the one thing that stands out is that each 126 • Police Psychology attempts to identify a suspect of a crime, or series of crimes, by examining his/her behavior at a crime particular crime scene(s). Profiling has several goals: (1) assist in identifying the suspect, (2) identify personality traits and modus operandi that will make the suspect(s) unique in his particular crime classification, (3) link a series of crimes together by identifying the signature of the offender, and (4) to a much lesser degree, predict future crimes as a form of prevention.

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  Profiling in Policy and Practice

  • David Canter, Laurence Alison(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  For example, contributions have been made to interviewing strategies for many years from the study of memory recall (Fisher and Geiselman 1987); deception (Ekman 1991, Kohnken 1987) and the psychology of suggestibility (Gudjonsson 1992) but Shepherd (1991) is one of the few people to propose ethical guidelines. In the relatively new area of ‘Offender Profiling’, psychologists have remained silent.

  The purpose of this chapter is to break that silence by outlining some of the professional, legal and ethical issues associated with profiling and, in particular, the implications of expert opinion in investigations and in the courtroom.

  Offender Profiling and Psychology

  Origins of Profiling

  Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek headed men and such as sleep o’ nights; Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

  Shakespeare (from Julius Caesar)

  Associating idiosyncratic features with particular forms of behaviour has been a common theme throughout history and literature. Whilst the FBI have staked a claim to the genesis of ‘Offender Profiling’, the notion of inferring offender characteristics from actions has its origins as far back as Biblical references (Canter and Alison 1997).

  For many years, a variety of different sorts of people, with many different types of experience to draw upon, have always been prepared to give advice to the police about the type of person who has committed an unsolved crime. Over one hundred year ago, for example, Dr Thomas Bond described the characteristics of ‘Jack the Ripper’ by using his clinical experience to make inferences from the ways in which the Ripper’s victims had been killed. During World War II, William Langer, a psychiatrist, was commissioned by the United States Office of Strategic Services to provide a profile of Adolf Hitler. Langer was correct about Hitler’s determination to fight to the end, his worsening mental condition and, ultimately, his suicide.

  The technique rose to prominence after James A. Brussel’s profile of the ‘Mad Bomber of New York’ and in particular during the 1960s and 1970s with the increasing trend in serial killing which led to the development of a ‘profiling’ unit at the FBI Academy at Quantico in Virginia who defined the process of profiling as one of:

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  Advances in Psychology and Law

  International Contributions

  • Santiago Redondo, Vicente Garrido, Jorge Pérez, Rosemary Barberet, Santiago Redondo, Vicente Garrido, Jorge Pérez, Rosemary Barberet(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  An Empirical Approach to Offender Profiling J.L. Jackson, J.C.M. Herbrink and P. van Koppen What is Offender Profiling? Over the last few years there has been an upsurge in public and media interest as well as scientific research in the area of crime analysis known as Offender Profiling. The basic motivation underlying the development of this type of analysis is the desire to apply scientific methods to police investigations and thereby increase the likelihood of successful detection of criminals. Whilst the actual methods being explored by various research groups vary considerably, they share a common goal in that all attempt to facilitate detection by objectively predicting characteristics of offenders such as age, personality and life style. Several methods are available which tackle Offender Profiling from an analytic bottom-up approach. This profiling has mainly involved using statistical analysis -such as cluster techniques or multivariate analysis - on large data bases to see whether it is possible to classify offenders with respect to aspects of the crime and personal characteristics. As is the case in several other countries, such data bases exist or are in the process of being assembled in the Netherlands. Another method which is currently being used in our institute to develop an Offender Profiling system for domestic burglaries is based on AI techniques. Using data collected from analyses of police files, transcripts of observations made by the police at the scene of the crime, structured interviews with detectives and interviews with convicted burglars, a computer-based profiler is being developed which should be able to assist the police in their investigations. A further approach to profiling, and the one which we will consider in more depth in this chapter, is that adopted by the American FBI.

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  Criminal Psychology and Forensic Technology

  A Collaborative Approach to Effective Profiling

  • Grover Maurice Godwin(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  This is not to say, of course, that these individual skills are equally important to the practice of profiling. In comparison to the police and perhaps the psychics, the group of psychologists showed superior perfor-mance in several components of the task. The study’s findings therefore might be taken to suggest that specifically psychological knowledge is more perti-nent to successful profiling than investigative experience and intuition. Admittedly, the data on the offender’s psychological characteristics are to some degree ambiguous in this respect, because the psychologists were inclined to check a greater number of identifying characteristics; but this finding could also be interpreted to indicate that psychologists are able to depict the offender’s personality in a relatively multifaceted fashion, whereas the other groups tend more to a one-dimensional characterization. In any event, the study does encourage the view that an educated insight into human behavior could play an important role in the process of psychological pro-filing. At the same time, it must be stressed that the psychologists’ perfor-mance did not differ significantly from that of the student group, so it remains uncertain whether the psychologists’ advantage over some other groups was Criminal Profiling: From Art to Science 93 predominantly in regard to specific knowledge of behavioral science or in some respect also to a broader capacity for objective and logical analysis. The performance of the group of police officers, on the other hand, was not strong. This finding is somewhat at odds with the claim by Hazelwood that investigative experience is the most essential factor in successful profil-ing. 97 The commonly voiced view that psychological profiling cannot be taught in the classroom 46,97 might deserve reconsideration. That is, police training academies might usefully give greater attention to formal instruction in this area. More explicit empirical scrutiny of this issue is called for.

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  Criminal Profiling

  An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis

  • Brent E. Turvey(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  v–vi This section discusses the pros and cons of using criminal profiling (the inference of offender characteristics) as evidence in court. To accomplish this goal, we present a review of cases involving criminal profiling testimony and subsequent court rulings. Nomo-inductive and ideo-deductive processes are identified, and the rel-evant issues in each case are discussed. As this implies, a secondary purpose of this section is to elucidate just how different deductive criminal profiling is from the inductive profiling techniques associated with psychological syndrome evidence. Criminal Profilers in Court Perhaps unsatisfied with the limited venue of criminal investigations, and perhaps also because of their involvement in it, criminal profilers have begun a new tradition to close out the old millennium—courtroom testimony. As discussed in Turvey (2000): Despite the investigative use intended for criminal profiling, it is becoming more common for criminal profilers to find themselves asked to give expert forensic opinions on criminal and civil matters in courts of law. Criminal profiling testimony has been sought relating to areas of specialized knowledge (i.e.—victimology, offense planning, modus operandi, motive, foreseeability, etc.), as well as issues relating to offender identity. These identity issues encompass such things as likely offender characteristics and determinations relating to alleged unique behavioral patterns, common scheme or plan, and other behavioral characteristics of crimes that may 11 This author has prepared criminal profiles that include traits such as offender sex and offender race. However, this has been done only when supported by the physical evidence. Falsification The cornerstone of the scientific method, this refers to subjecting a theory to repeated attacks in order to disprove it—testing it against the case facts or alternate theories. Criminal Profiling in Court

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