Top down approach + Evaluation

Offender profiling

A behaviour tool, intended to help investigators accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown offenders

Top Down - American

Collecting data about a murder and then deciding on the category the data best fits. Disorganised or Organised

Organised offender

Offender who shows evidence of planning, having a specific type of victim.

Disorganised offender

Offender who shows little evidence of planning, leaves clues.

(+) Meketa 2017

Applied to burglaries, lead to an 85% rise in solver cases in 3 US states. They added 2 new concepts to this: interpersonal (offender knows victim, steals something of significance) and opportunistic (generally inexperienced young offender)

(+) Canter et al 2004

Meta analysis on 100 US murders committed each by different serial killers. Analysis revealed that there is a subset of features which matched the FBI's typology for organised offenders.

(-) Alison et al

Suggested that this approach is naive + informed by old-fashioned models of personality (seeing behaviours fuelled by dispositional traits rather than external [changing] factors).

(+) Pinnizotto

In 148 cases it helped focus the investigation, saving many days' work.

(-) Pinnizotto

In 192 cases, profiling identified the suspect in only 15.