Recap/overview

Offender profiling - is to investigate technique that produces a description of characteristics of an offender based on crime scene or data to narrow down the potential suspects

The top-down approach

• American approach

• Had a typology - disorganised and organised which could be used to find the offender

• FBI interviewed 36 sexually-motivated murderers including ted bundy

• 7 had killed one person and 29 had killed multiple

• Wanted to see behavioural differences a the crime scenes between crimes committed by organised and disorganised murders

• Concluded that the data could be catergorised into organised or disorganised offenders - each had certain characteristics

• Organised and disorganised is based on the idea that serious offenders have certain signatures ‘ways of working’ (Modus Operandi) and these generally correlate with a particular set of social and psychological characteristics that relate to the individual

• There are 4 main stages in the construction of an FBI profile: Data assimilation, Crime scene classification, Crime reconstruction, Profile generation

+Research support - Canter et al (2004)

Counter point -