Offender Profiling: The Bottom-Up Approach

The Bottom-Up Approach: Profilers work up from evidence collected from the crime scene to develop hypotheses about the likely characteristics, motivations and social background of the offender.

Investigative Psychology: A form of bottom-up profiling that matches details from the crime scene with statistical analysis of typical offender behaviour patterns based on psychological theory.

Geographical Profiling: A form of bottom-up profiling based on the principle of spatial consistency - than an offender’s operational base and possible future offences are revealed by the geographical location of their previous crime.

Interpersonal Coherence: The way an offender behaves at a scene, including how they ‘interact’ with their victim, may reflect their behaviour in everyday situations.

Forensic Awareness: Those individuals who have been subject of police interrogation before, may denote how mindful they are of ‘covering their tracks’.

The Marauder: Operates in close proximity to their home base

The Commuter: Likely to have travelled a distance away from their usual residence.

Evidence for Investigative Psychology: Canter and Heritage (1990) conducted an analysis of 66 sexual assault cases. The data was examined using small space analysis and several behaviours were identified as common in different samples of behaviour with each individual displaying a characteristic pattern of such behaviours and this can help establish whether two or more offences were committed by the same person.

Evidence Support for Geographical Profiling: Lundrigan and Canter (2001) collated information from 120 murder cases involving serial killers in the US. The location of each body disposal site created a ‘centre of gravity’ because, when offenders start from their home base, they may go in a different direction each time they dispose of the body, but this creates a ring around their home base. The offender’s base was invariably located in the centre of the pattern.

Geographical Information Insufficient: The success of geographical profiling may be reliant on the quality of data that the police can provide, however this is not always accurate. Between police forces, an estimated 75% of crimes aren’t even reported which calls into question the utility of an approach that relies on the accuracy of geo data as even if the data is correct, critics claim that other factors are just as important.