Question

Criminal profiling has received a lot of media attention over the past few years. Describe the process of criminal profiling and the different approaches. What is your opinion of criminal profiling? Is it effective? Use examples from the research literature to support your comments.

Answer 1

• Criminal profiling (also known as offender profiling and specific profile analysis) is to create a psychological and not only psychological portrait, determine location of the offenders by gathering their personal attributes from crime scene behavior in order to assist in detection of them.
• Criminal profiling is typically used when offender’s identity is unknown and with serious criminal offences such as murder, sexual assault. Profilers also work on crime series, where is considered, that the crime is committed by the same offender.
• The process of profiling draws both, physical and nonphysical information. This includes the layout of the crime scene in terms of disposition of the victim and the presence or absence of significant items, evidence on what was done to the victim and the sequence of events,and the perpetrator’s behavior before and after the crime.
• From these data, inferences are drawn about the possible meaning and motivation of particular acts. For example, tying up a victim may mean a necessity for control, while stabbing the victim before sexual intercourse may mean a need for arousal from pain or blood.
• Characteristics of the victim, location of the crime, use of a vehicle, and relation to previous crimes may also suggest social and demographic features of the offender, such as race, age or occupation.
• Ainsworth has identified four main approaches to criminal profiling, these are:
• The geographical approach – this looks at patterns in the location and timing of offences to make judgements about links between crimes and suggestions about where offenders live and work.
• Investigative psychology – this grew out of geographical profiling and uses established psychological theories and methods of analysis to predict offender characteristics from offending behavior.
• The typological approach – this involves looking at the characteristics of crime scenes to assign offenders to different categories, each category of offender having different typical characteristics.
• The clinical approach – this approach uses insights from psychiatry and clinical psychology to aid investigation where an offender is thought to be suffering from a mental illness of other psychological abnormality.
• The process of criminal profiling can be divided into five stages:
• Profiling inputs-This step involves gathering all the information about the crime. This may be any kind of information that would help understand what happened, how it happened and why. On this stage gathering of background information about the victim such as his/her employment, activities, friends, habits, social status, criminal history is also very important.
  
• Decision processing-During this step, all the information gathered in the first stage is being organized in order classify the crime by type and style. A correct classification will assist profiler in determining the direction of investigation.
• Crime assessment-After summarizing all the information gathered in previous steps, the crime assessment is made. The primary aim of this stage is reconstructing a sequence of events that took place before, during and after committing a crime and determine the behavior of both, victim and offender.
  
• The offender profile-This stage focuses on hypothesizing about the type of a person who committed an offence. The created profile will include information, which describes offender. In some examples this information will include age, sex, location, social status, intelligence, physiological characteristics, etc.
  
• Investigative use-There are two main ways in which an offender profile can help in investigation. Firstly, criminal profilers make a report for investigators so that they will concentrate their efforts on finding an offender, that matches characteristics in the profile and secondly it will be used for planning an interview process of suspects.
  
• The use of offender profiling is controversial. Many people including myself don’t believe in it, because it is not an exact science. One of the flaws of offender profiling is “Stereotyping.” this occurs in a case, when profiler starts believing something about a person based on small number of characteristics. Many unsuccessful profiles are created if they are based solely on Stereotyping.
• Human beings are versatile, and no one can ever predict with 100% accuracy how a human will heal or react.Criminal profilers work the same way. They may not always be 100% accurate.