Top down and bottom up profiling

What is offender profiling

• tools employed by police when solving crimes

• characteristics of the offender can be deduced from the characteristics of the crime scene

• aim = to narrow the field of inquiry and list of suspects

Goals of profiling

Holmes and Holmes (1989) identified 3 main goals:

1. Social and Psychological assessment - information on personality, age, race, sex, employment

2. Psychological evaluation of belongings - possessions which may associate an offender with the crime scene, such as souvenirs from the crime scene, photos or pornography

3. Interviewing suggestions and strategies - once a profile is built, the profiler is responsible for developing questioning techniques for the offender once in custody, as they will have an idea on how to draw out the required information

Top-Down approach to offender profiling

• Started in America in the 1970’s by the FBI

• Data gathered from in-depth interviews with 36 sexually motivated serial killers

• the FBI used this to create Templates

• Profilers will match what they know about the crime and the offender to these templates

• Profiler will look carefully at the crime scene and draw conclusions about the offender

• Murderers and rapists are classified into one of two categories - Organised and Disorganised

Organised and Disorganised

• Hazelwood and Douglas (1980) made the first distinction between two types of offenders

• Based on the idea that serious offenders have Signature ‘Ways of working’ - this is known as their Modus Operandi (MO)

• This signature way of working usually correlates with a set of social and psychological characteristics about the offender which can inform subsequent investigations.

Douglas later went on to identify a third offender type known as ‘mixed’ to classify those who do not fit into either original category

Behaviour towards victims (O/D)

Organised

• planned the crime in advance

• victim targeted

• controls conversation

• has a ‘type’

Disorganised

• spontaneous/spur of the moment

• victim selected at random

• crime unplanned

• avoids conversation

Crime scene detail (O/D)

Organised

• weapon absent

• body hidden from view

• body moved from crime scene

• attempts to clean up

• little evidence left

Disorganised

• weapon present

• sexual activity after death

• body left in view at crime scene

• little control of victim by offender

Characteristics of criminal (O/D)

Organised

• high intelligence

• socially competent

• sexually competent

• skilled occupation

• usually married/may have kids

Disorganised

• average intelligence or lower

• socially immature

• sexually incompetent

• poor work history

• lives alone

• lives close to crime scene

FBI profiling process (Jackson and Berkerian 1997)

1. data assimilation - data compiled from police reports, post mortems, crime scene photos etc.

2. crime classification - profilers decide whether the crime scene is organised or disorganised

3. crime reconstruction - hypotheses about crime sequence, offender and victim behaviour etc.

4. profile generation - offender’s physical, demographic and behavioural characteristics

Key study - Canter et al (2004)

• Aim

  • to test the accuracy of Organised and Disorganised offender types

• Method

  • content analysis on 100 cases of serial killers in the US

  • used criteria set out by Douglas et al (1992) to classify the crimes as organised or disorganised

• Results

  • found a significantly higher number of disorganised crimes

  • further analysis of the types of crime did not clearly separate organised and disorganised

• Conclusion

  • either disorganised crimes are easier to spot or fewer organised crimes are committed

  • if it is that they are easier to spot, that may suggest the criteria is insufficient

AO3 - too restrictive

P = it could be argued that by only having 2 categories, the top down approach is too restrictive

EX = it is likely that criminals do not fit neatly into either category, and this makes the prediction of their characteristics difficult

EV = Grover and Godwin (2002) questioned these classifications by asking how a killer with high intelligence and sexual competence who commits a spontaneous murder in which the body is left at the crime scene would be classified as they display characteristics of both and organised and disorganised murderer.

EXT = as well as this, Holmes (1989) proposed that instead of murderes being organised into only 2 categories, there are 4 types of serial killer. Visionary, mission, hedonistic and power/control. Unique characteristics help us to identify what type of killer they are, such as hedonistic killers who kill for the rush and personal gain or power killers who aim to have complete control over their victims

LB = this suggests that Hazelwood and Douglas’s 2 categories potentially oversimplify the motivations and characteristics of killers, and Holme’s categories could be used in murderer cases instead

AO3 - research support

P = there is research support for an organised category by Canter et al (2004)

EV = they looked at 100 US serial killings and smallest space analysis, an output program used to generate a profile based on the evidence from the crime scene, to assess the co-occurrence of 39 aspects of many serial killings

EX = the analysis revealed common behaviours of many serial killings which match the FBI’s typology for organised offenders, and this suggests that this particular key component of the FBI typology approach does have some validity

EXT = furthermore, although some psychologists criticise how the top-down approach cannot be used for crimes other than murder, torture or rape, Meketa (2017) reported that it can be adapted to other types of crime like burglary. The adaptation adds two new categories: interpersonal offender (offender knows victim) and opportunistic offender (inexperienced young offender), and after reports of its application, there was an 85% rise in solved cases in 3 US states

LB = this suggests that top-down profiling has a wider application than previously thought, while also providing evidence of its validity