Criminal Psychology – Offender Profiling 

 

Offender Profiling is often used when the identity of the felon is unknown; the profiler uses personal effects to determine the felons psychological state and location. It is quintessentially used in significant criminal offences for example: murder, sexual assault also psychotic and serial offenders. It is often referred to as creating a sketch of the felons psychological state. 

 

What creates the profile isn’t necessarily widely agreed but the task finds both physical and psychological data including: the crime scenes layout regarding the victims nature and the presence or lack of notable evidence; evidence of the action/s performed against the victim and in which sequence the were performed in, and the felons behavioral pattern before and after the act was committed; from the information conclusions are drawn about the meaning and incentive. Features of the victim for example, location may also indicate communal and demographic attributes of the offender such as the offenders race, age or profession. The whole point of an offender profile is to narrow down the spectrum to be able to find the killer more accurately. There are some basic presumptions for example the felons behavior at the scene of the crime that are psychologically and physically similar.  The predominant use of criminal profiling is used to solve serial crimes and sexual assault; 90% of profiling endeavors involve murder or rape. Some suggest that profiling is most effective when the crime displays psychopathology, such as, barbarous assaults, rapes or demonic and cult killings but there are exceptions where it has been used in cases of arson, indecent phone calls and bank robbery. 

The main 2 types of profiling are: the profiling of the felons attributes  and geographical profiling. The former is most commonly what people think of criminal profiling where as the latter is mainly disregarded. The latter could be asked to pinpoint the location of the criminal whereas the latter could be asked to create a profile against the unknown offender and from the profile advise the police on which suspects are more likely to be guilty. Mary Ainsworth came up with 4 main approaches to offender profiling, these are: the geographical approach which looks for similarities between the locations and timings to make links towards the offenders occupation and to the whereabouts of the offenders residence; investigative psychology is a stem from the geographical approach which uses traditional psychological algorithms of analysis to predict features of the felons from the offenders behavior; another approach is the typological approach which involves looking at the attributes of the crime scene to allocate the criminal into a different classification with each classification of felons having different stereotypical characteristics and finally the clinical approach which uses advice from psychiatric and clinical psychological to support the enquiry where the felon is expected to have a mental illness or another psychological abnormality. 

The process of profiling characteristics is normally based on the assumption that the offender is acting upon his/her thinking but the “how you think is how you act” idea is inaccurate as it does not take into account that sometimes the offenders actions have been influenced by an outside party for example: the victim or a witnesses, which then means that the “how you think is how you act” idea is no longer valid or accurate. It is the role of the profiler to invade a behavior that fits the person rather than the situation the person is in. There are 5 stages of criminal profiling which are in the following order:  profiling input which involves collecting evidence from the crime which could be any form of useful information to help comprehend the situation and at this point it is crucial to find significant evidence about the victim; decision processing – during this stage all the original information which was gathered is then categorized by type and style. If you classify the information correctly it should assist  the investigation; crime assessment – after condensing the information you have you should be able to create a reconstruction of the events that happened surrounding and during the crime concerning the offender and the victim; the offender profile is the step in which you would make an educated guess about the person who committed the crime, the profile should include age, gender, location, class, education and physiological characteristics. There are two main ways the information can now be useful; it is useful as the profiler would create a report for the investigators so they could narrow down the search to match characteristics of the profile given and then it could also be used to create the interview so the investigators could ask the right questions to find the offender.  

Offender profiling it still greatly debated on how effective it is as it is not an exact science. One of the main flaws of offender profiling is “stereotyping” this happens when the profiler creates the idea of the person based on only a small amount of his/her features and as a result of this many inaccurate profiles are created.

Elizabeth Nicholls. Year 10.