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... At their wits end the Lafayette Police called in offender profiler Kim Rossmo to consult on the investigation. Rossmo, a Canadian Police Officer trained in criminology, specializes in geographic profiling, and within several days of visiting the various crime scenes, reviewing the investigation data, and mapping out the city, he was able to use a computer program to predict the approximate location of the perpetrators residence. ... (MacDonald, 2000)
Although not all profiling is as successful and scientific as the geographic profiling case study mentioned above, it is the premises of this paper that criminal profiling, in its various forms, can be a useful investigative tool. ... In its presentation, this paper will first review the history and definition of offender profiling, followed by a look at the actual effectiveness of profiling as determined through several research projects. A discussion on pertinent advice to Police Officers contemplating the use of an offender profiler will then follow, prior to a concluding statement.
History of Criminal Profiling
According to Petherick (1999), profiling has been around in one form or another for many years, often in the guise of advice provided to Police by psychiatrists or psychologists, regarding the possible motivations of a certain crime. Having said that however, the first actual example of profiling on record is that made by Dr. ...
Profiling was also used in World War II, when agents of the Strategic Services Office, the forerunner of the Criminal Intelligence Agency, asked a psychiatrist to provide a profile of Adolph Hitler. ...
Profiling gradually became more and more common in Police investigations as time passed, particularly in the USA, where the detection by profilers of such famous cases as the “Mad Bomber of New York”, and the “Boston Strangler”, put their work in demand. ... Howard Teten, actually developed a systematic approach to profiling, centered around the determination of an offender’s behavior through the evidence at a crime scene (Wilson et al, 1997). These behavioral profiling methods then began to be taught by Teten and his colleague Mallany, at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) training facility in 1970. ...
The FBI’s approach to profiling is however only one of the various methods, or combination of methods, used by profilers to predict or provide information about an offender. This paper will go onto explain the major methods of offender profiling in due course, however first the exact definition of profiling needs to be explored.
Offender Profiling Defined
No common definition to explain offender profiling has yet been accepted by the academic community at large, which makes it difficult to determine what exactly constitutes profiling (Module 3). ... They go onto say that this fragmentation occurs in three ways: differences in frameworks used by profilers for analyzing behavior, the fact that two profilers never produce the same results as profiling is observation based, and finally that differences in culture mean that methods may not be used on an international basis.
One widely accepted definition however is by Copson (1995), who defines offender profiling as:
“any predictions, recommendations and observations based on the inference of offender characteristics from behavior exhibited in a crime or a series of crimes, and offered to the investigators as the product of either statistical analysis of collected police data on past crimes or on relevant clinical expertise, typically as a psychologist or psychiatrist”
Regardless of the definition offered, there are usually some common elements, in that the behavior of an offender as revealed by the scene of crime, and as related by the victim, all allow conclusions to be drawn about the nature of the offender (Jackson and Berkerian, 1997).
Profiling is normally only used for more serious crimes against the person, such as homicide or rape, and obviously for those crimes at the hands of unknown persons. In that regard, Copson (1995) describes four types of information that police investigators normally desire from profilers, namely: characteristics of unknown offenders, an understanding of an offender’s behavior, suggested interview strategies if the offender is brought into custody, and the potential for linking a series of offences to the same offender through behavioral characteristics.
Types of Offender Profiling
FBI Method
The most widely used and publicized type of profiling is that practiced by the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (now known as the Investigative Support Unit), which is often romanticized in the media through films such as “Silence of the Lambs” and “Hannibal”.
Approximate Word count = 3496
Approximate Pages = 14
(250 words per page double spaced)
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