Home » Yr2 Week 15 – Forensics – Profiling

Yr2 Week 15 – Forensics – Profiling

The Top-Down Approach

Offender profiling is a behavioural investigative tool used to aid the police/FBI in capturing or narrowing down a list of potential suspects. Profilers are called in to high profile cases to work alongside the police, they analyse the crime scene and witness reports and advise on interview techniques as well as developing potential hypotheses (predictions) about the likely characteristics of the offender.

The top down profiling dichotomy of organised and disorganised typologies of offenders was developed by Douglas and Ressler. They interviewed 36 convicted criminals, including Ted Bundy and Charles Manson (Original Journal link – https://vault.fbi.gov/Criminal%20Profiling/Criminal%20Profiling%20Part%203%20of%207). From these interviews they developed a template to match the crime and crime scene with the potential offender. Profilers, after viewing the evidence and crime scene advise on the likelihood of the offender being of organised personality and behavioural type or disorganised.

page_6 There are four main stages employed by the FBI in profile construction

Data assimilation – review of evidence
Crime scene classification – dichotomy of organised or disorganised
Crime reconstruction – behaviour of victim and testing of hypotheses based on classification
Profile generation – personality and likely characteristics of the offender

Profiling has captured people’s attention probably due mostly to media representation of it being quite glamorous and magical!

Good TV associated with the top down approach – Criminal Minds (Sky), To catch a Killer (Netflix), Silence of the Lambs (18 certificate), UK Cracker

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/americas-most-notorious-criminals_n_3761487

http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/criminal.aspx

Professor-David-Canter

The Bottom-Up Approach

The Bottom-up approach is the British investigative tool for aiding the police in catching and narrowing down suspect lists. It is far more data driven than the top-down approach and is more heavily grounded in psychological theory. David Canter of Liverpool University is the psychologist associated with the bottom up approach and with its successful application (Railway Rapist). Canter looks at five factors: interpersonal coherence, time and place significance, criminal characteristics, criminal career and forensic awareness. The aim of bottom up profiling to establish patterns of behaviour that are likely to occur across crime scenes. It is particularly good at identifying if crimes are linked based on re-occurring characteristics of the crime scene and behaviour of the offender (inter-personal coherence).

Geographical profiling

The video below gives a nice clear explanation of geographical profiling. Some key terminology to note down – Marauder and commuter.

Canter successfully profiled the railway rapist, a case in the 1980s that police could not solve due to the amount of potential suspects. Canter was able to assist in reducing the suspect list therefore prioritising persons of interest. This led to the successful capturing of John Duffy and later his accomplice. The following video is a documentary about the case.