Offender profiling: Top-down approach

define offender profiling

A behavioural & analytical tool that is intended to help investigators accurately predict & profile the characteristics of unknown offenders

Offender profiling is an…employed by the police when solving crimes

investigative tool

what is the main aim of offender profiling

to narrow the field of enquiry and the list of likely suspects

Professional profilers will often be ….

called upon to work alongside the police especially during high profile murder cases

what does the compiling of a profile usually involve

careful scrutiny of the crime scene and analysis of the evidence in order to generate hypotheses about the probable characteristics of the offender

what is the top-down approach

Profilers start with pre-established typology & work down to lower levels in order to assign offenders to one of two categories based on witness accounts & evidence from the crime scene

what is an organised offender

An offender who shows evidence of planning, targets a specific victim & tends to be socially & sexually competence with higher than average intelligence

what is a disorganised offender

An offender who shows little evidence of planning, leaves clues & tends to be socially & sexually incompetent with lower than average intelligence

what are the two typology categories used in offender profiling

disorganised & organised offender

when did the top-down approach originate

in the United States as a result of work carried out by the FBI in the 1970s

what is the top-down approach also known as

the typology appraoch

how does the organised and disorganised distinction work

it is based on the idea that serious offenders have certain signature ‘ways of working’ and these generally correlate with a particular set of social and psychological characteristics that relate to the individual

what are the 4 main stages in the construction of an FBI profile

data assimilation, crime scene classification, crime reconstruction, profile generation

what is data assimilation

a review of evidence (crime scene photographs, reports, etc.)

what is crime scene classification

organised or disorganised

what is crime reconstruction

hypothesis in terms of sequence of events, behaviour of the victims, etc

what is profile generation

hypothesis related to the likely offender – demographic background, physical characteristics, behaviour, etc.

explain the weakness only applied to particular crimes

is best suited to crime scenes that reveal important details about the suspect as well as crimes that involve macabre practices as more common offenses do not lend themselves to profiling because the resulting crime scene reveals very little about the offender

explain the weakness based on outdated models of personality

the typology classification system is based on the assumption that offenders have patterns of behaviour & motivations that remain consistent across situations & contexts. Several critics have suggested that this approach is naive and informed by old-fashioned models of personality that see behaviour as being driven by stable dispositional traits rather than external factors that may be constantly changing

explain the weakness classification is too simplistic

the behaviours that describe the organised & disorganised types are not mutually exclusive; a variety of combinations could occur in any given murder scene. More recently researchers have proposed more detailed typology models