criminal profiling
...as using profiling as a way of providing advice to police agencies as to the type of perpetrator they were seeking, and in some cases, they could provide possible motivations for the criminal activity (Turvey, pg. 103.) Their recommendations are still used today in many trials as a means to convict an accused criminal. The first example of profiling available for reference which is referred to as a profile in the modern sense was the suggestion of Dr. Thomas Bond. Bond was a police surgeon who was responsible for the autopsy on Mary Kelly, one of the last known victims of Jack the Ripper. He was initially called into the investigation to make an assessment of the surgical technique of the perpetrator. He also attempted a crude reconstruction of many aspects of the crime in an attempt to obtain as many facts of the case as possible and what had actually happened when the crime was committed (Godwin, pg. 102.) One aspect of the modern day profiler’s work is to examine a series of cases and inform those investigating the case as to whether there is a link between two or more cases based on evidence collected from the scene of the crime and the victims of those crimes. Bond performed a similar duty to this stating that all of the victims had died by the same hand and that mulitilations of the infamous Ripper’s victims “were all of the same character” (Godwin, pg. 125.) This statement spoken by Bond coined the term “signature”, that is, the behaviors or actions that fulfill a physical need in the criminal. Criminal profiling methods are linked together as one group of techniques. They all rely on the same methods, follow one set of procedures, and practiced by individuals from the same background. This is only true to a certain percent of cases. In modern times, not all criminal profiling methods are the same and the backgrounds of those who practice this art are completely different. The FBI’s method involve comparing the behavior of the current accused offender with those offenders the profiler has encountered in the past and the broad offender groups developed through studying similar crimes and criminals (Douglas, pg. 127.) Investigative psychology relies heavily on the methods of environmental psychology along with some new investigative tools that have been developed since the institution of the formal Investigative Psychology program. The driving force between this technique is the use of psychology but the method has been moved beyond basic psychological principles (Inmes, pg 55.) The main difference between the FBI and Investigative Psychology is that the Investigative Psychology methods does not use statistics on broad offender groups, and relies primarily on forensic science for the reconstruction of the criminal event, th...