Offender Profiling

How do investigators catch notorious criminals wanted for gruesome crimes? With some clever analysis and psychological theory, offender profiles can be built to pin down the patterns, locations and identities of the most horrific criminal minds. Let's explore offender profiling in forensic psychology.

• First, we will define offender profiling.
• Next, we will examine the history of offender profiling involving famous cases.
• Then we will give a successful offender profiling example.
• After, we will identify some types of offender profiling, including the top-down approach with organised and disorganised offender types and the bottom-up approach in investigative psychology.
• Finally, we will explore offender profiling in psychology, including more on investigative psychology and geographical profiling, plus an overall evaluation of offender profiling.

Fig. 1 - Offender profiling explores how to catch a criminal.

Offender Profiling Definition

Offender profiling is a practice done in forensic psychology used to help identify potential suspects involved in a crime. We can define offender profiling as:

Forensic psychologists carry out offender profiling to help police services. Building a profile of the offender of a crime can include victim/witness statements and crime scene evidence.

• Other information included in an offender profile also contains known and predicted personal information about the suspected individual, including social characteristics such as marital status, employment and any hobbies or social groups.
• Offender profiling also considers potential mental characteristics that are known or predicted about the offender, such as education and motivation.

Understanding more about the offender and their motivations can help identify possible criminal behaviour patterns that could help an investigation and the apprehension of the criminal in question. Offender profiles could also contain potential interview strategies for obtaining as much information about related crimes as possible from a guilty offender.

Fig. 2 - Forensic psychologists put together offender profiles.

History of Offender Profiling

In England, one of the earliest known cases of offender profiling concerns the unknown identity of Jack the Ripper in the 1880s. In Whitechapel in London, this still unidentified serial killer gruesomely murdered a presumably unknown number of women. Crime scene and victim autopsy evidence revealed a predicted offender profile.

The offender profile was made using the crime scene and autopsy evidence. For example, a solitary life is expected due to the predicted time of the murders (late at night or early hours of the morning), suggesting that no family or work colleagues would be present to become suspicious of any strange behaviour.

Offender Profiling Example

A more successful historical case of offender profiling is that of George Metesky, known as the 'mad bomber', who detonated 30-plus bombs in New York City public areas in the 1940s and 50s. Famous psychiatrist James Brussel successfully identified an offender profile for the bomber, including what kind of clothes he would wear.

Types of Offender Profiling

Two main types of offender profiling are used across the UK and the US. They were developed using different strategies and are known as the top-down and bottom-up approaches.

Top-down Approach

The top-down approach is an American approach as it is used, and was developed by, the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), who pioneered their behavioural science unit in the 1970s.

The FBI interviewed 36 sexually motivated killers (including Ted Bundy), creating typologies (categories of characteristics put into classifications) based on responses to questions, such as possible triggers and warning signs for criminal behaviour.

Using these typologies from the interviews, Ressler (1986) developed the organised and disorganised classification system for offender profiling.

• They classified 24 characteristics as organised and 12 as disorganised, suggesting distinct types of crime characteristics and profiles of the offender.

Fig. 3 - There are two approaches to offender profiling used in the UK and US.

Organised offenders can be more difficult to catch than disorganised types due to the planning involved, the lengths they go to cover their crimes and because they are often more familiar with police investigation techniques.

According to Douglas et al. (1986), there are typically four steps followed in the top-down approach:

1. Collection and reviewing of crime scene evidence.
2. Crime scene classification (is it organised or disorganised).
3. Hypothesise what happened and reconstruct the crime scene (both offender and victim).
4. Then the findings can be used to generate the offender profile (categorising as an organised or disorganised offender).

Bottom-up Approach

The bottom-up approach is the British investigative process of offender profiling. Pioneered by David Canter and Paul Britton, Canter is the UK’s leading profiling expert.

There are no typologies used in this approach, offender profiles are made using crime scene evidence and statistics. A computer programme uses the data inputted from the crime scene to generate correlations for patterns of criminal behaviour.

The bottom-up approach is also known as investigative psychology, which we will look at in more detail below.

Offender Profiling: Psychology

As previously mentioned, offender profiling is used within forensic psychology. Here we will explore investigative psychology and geographical profiling as ways of offender profiling in psychology.

Investigative Psychology: Bottom-up Approach

In the United Kingdom in 1985, an offender known as the Railway Rapist - wanted for over 20 cases of sexual assault and three murders, was successfully profiled by a psychologist called Dr David Canter as a man called John Duffy.

This led Dr Canter to develop the method of investigative psychology.

There are five main aspects of offender profiling looked at in investigative psychology:

1. Personal characteristics.
2. Criminal history.
3. Location.
4. Social characteristics.
5. Career and educational history/level.

To examine this more closely, we study a person's:

• Interpersonal coherence - The offender's behaviour towards victims and during crimes reflects their normal behaviour. e.g. being a tidy person means a not-very messy crime scene.
• Time and place - Predictions about the offender's residence or place of work can be made from the time and location of the committed crimes.
• Criminal characteristics - these are characteristics that the offender has that can classify and could predict their criminal behaviour. For example, anti-social behaviour and personality traits.
• Criminal career - Examines how long the offender has been committing crimes which can help to predict how this activity might develop.
• Forensic awareness - previous criminal behaviour and encounters with the criminal justice system suggest the offender has some knowledge of the forensic investigation.

Fig. 4 - Investigative psychology analyses crime scene evidence using statistical procedures and psychological theory.

Geographical Profiling

There are several forms of geographical profiling from different psychologists to gain information about offender hunting patterns.

Circle Theory proposed by Dr Canter suggests two models of geographical profiling for an offender: the marauder - who commits crimes near their home or base, and the commuter - who commits crimes some distance away from their residence.

Offender Profiling Evaluation

The bottom-up approach can be used in a wider range of crimes than the top-down approach, such as burglary. The top-down approach can only profile crimes of sexually motivated killers, as that is where the categorisations stem from. The top-down approach is also reductionist due to its simplicity.

Because the bottom-up approach uses science and statistical analysis, it could be said the bottom-up approach is a stronger method of offender profiling.

Despite its advantages, the bottom-up approach has had some significant failures in catching offenders.

• In 1992 in the Rachel Nickell murder case, an innocent man was arrested because he fit the psychologist's profile.

• Research suggests that police forces survey offender profiling to be more useful than it actually is; within 48 UK police forces, only 3% of cases used accurate and successful offender profiling, despite 83% of their officers saying it's a useful tool (Copson, 1995).
• Holmes (1989) found that offender profiling contributed a mere 17% to arrests made in 88 cases out of 192.

Other research supports using geographical profiling and spatial information to catch an offender.

• Lundrigan and Canter (2001) analysed information from 120 murder cases involving serial killers in America. The killers in these cases operated in a centre of gravity with evidence and their base being at this central location, supporting the concept of a marauder offender.