PSYC 3120: Forensic Psychology - Module 3B (Investigative Profiling)

Criminal Profiling

A technique for identifying the major personality and behavioural characteristics of an individual based upon an analysis of the crimes he or she has committed

• Victim and suspect unknown to each other

• No clear motive for the crime

• Serial crimes: homicide, rape, arson - i.e., serious crimes

• Extreme psychopathology (e.g., indications of torture, ritualistic behaviour)

When is criminal profiling used?

1. Crime occurs & police begin the investigation

2. Police request an offender profile

   1. Typically provided by someone in law enforcement at national level (e.g., RCMP, FBI)

   2. Profiles can also be created by forensic psychologists/psychiatrists

3. Profiler examines case details and begins to form the profile

What is the process to obtain a profile?

1950s: NY Mad Bomber

First use of criminal profiling in US

1800s: Jack the Ripper

First use of criminal profiling

1970s

Criminal profiling program developed at the FBI for creating profiles and training profilers

1990s

Profiling research in the UK → investigative psychology

• US: Criminal Profiling

• UK: Behavioural Investigative Advice

• CA: Criminal Investigative Analysis

How do different countries refer to the ‘criminal profiling’ process?

• Suspect prioritization

• New lines of enquiry

• Setting traps to flush out offender (e.g., by releasing profile to media)

• Determine dangerousness/future offender behaviour

• Advice on interrogation methods/cross-examination

What is the purpose of criminal profiling?

Inductive profiling

Profiling an offender from what is known about other offenders; Two types:

• Clinical

• Statistical

Clinical inductive profiling

A type of inductive profiling that uses experience working with offenders and intuition to make predictions

Problem: Unstructured and Unscientific

Statistical Inductive Profiling

A type of inductive profiling that uses empirical data & statistical analysis to link criminal actions to criminal characteristics; works with probabilities, not certainties

Problems: Sampling issues, hard to get a representative sample (e.g., what about the offenders that don’t get caught? What is different about them?)

Deductive Profiling

Profiling of an offender from evidence relating to the crime of that offender; relies primarily on logic.

Problem: logic does not always equal the truth

• Inductive profiling

• Deductive profiling

What are the two distinctions of profiling?

FBI profiling approach

Approach to profiling where offenders are divided into 2 main categories based on their characteristic crime scene behaviours & background characteristics

Organized vs unorganized offenders

1. No real scientific support

2. Most crime scenes show evidence of both types of offenders (organized & unorganized), and most offenders exhibit both types of characteristics

3. Research suggests the typology is not useful

What are the 3 issues with the FBI approach to profiling?

Canter et al., 2004 .

A study that analyzed data on serial killers and their behaviours to see if FBI profiling model was useful in classifying them. Overall, it was found that the approach wasn’t useful for two reasons. First, all offenders displayed some level of organizational behaviours, many of them the same behaviors, which is to be expected given they were able to develop into a “successful” serial killer. You would need some level of organization to succeed at anything, and the disorganized ones probably would’ve been caught early on. Second, disorganized behaviours were not likely to occur together, and offenders who did exhibit one disorganized behavior generally did not exhibit any others. In other words, there aren’t really any true disorganized offenders. The overall conclusion from this study is that the organized-disorganized model is not a promising approach despite its popularity.

Goodwill et al., 2016

A study that, using statistical cluster analysis, condensed complex offender data into distinct categories based on Selection(telio, pedo/hebe, or non-specific) and Behavior (socially competent, anti-social, or sexually deviant). This method simplified hundreds of variables to reveal a significant relationship between sexually deviant offenders and a preference for adult female victims (telio-specific). Ultimately, clustering allows for the detection of specific offender profiles that would otherwise be obscured by the volume of individual background characteristics

Investigative Psychology Approach

• An induced statistical approach to criminal profiling.

• Uses statistics to identify “clusters” or categories of behaviours/characteristics

• Statistical analysis to find relationships between behaviour and characteristic clusters