Current Affairs Journal: Seventh Entry

Have you ever seen a crime TV show (e.g. "Criminal minds") where one of the main characters, some CSI agent, cleverly predicts what some criminal’s next step will be? If so, you’ve already been acquainted with the concept of “Criminal Profiling”. So far most of you, as did I, might have believed that this is some nonsense writers came up with. But I can tell you: offender profiling is absolutely real!

Criminal profiling, more commonly known as offender profiling, is based on the belief that you can find out something about a perpetrator’s character by looking at their crimes. More specifically, you look at the crime they committed e.g. a murder as well as the crime scene and the victim itself. Of course creating an offender profile can’t tell you who the offender is. What it can in fact do is the following: a criminal profile gives you suggestions about what the psychological characteristics of the perpetrator might be. Having this kind of information helps narrow down a list of suspects and in consequence makes it a lot easier to find the offender.

After looking a little deeper into the world of offender profiling I found out that the (presumably) very first offender profile was already created in 1888. A surgeon called Thomas Bond wrote an offender profile about an unknown murderer. Today as well as in 1888 nobody knew who that man was but he became known to the whole world as “Jack the Ripper”. If we look at what Bond wrote, we’ll see that there is a lot of information in it that current offender profiles also need to include.

“The murderer in external appearance is quite likely to be a quiet inoffensive looking man probably middle-aged and neatly and respectably dressed. […]It is of course possible that the Homicidal impulse may have developed from a revengeful or brooding condition of mind…[…]He would be solitary and eccentric in his habits, also he is likely to be a man without regular occupation, but with some small income or pension. […]”

Thomas Bond was followed by many notable profilers, one of the most famous ones being Dr. James Brussel and David Canter. Literature, though, was one of the first means of communications that talked about offender profiling AT ALL (even before Bond!). In their books, Edgar Allan Poe and most notably Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of SHERLOCK HOLMES) used criminal profiling very similar to offender profiling that exists today. 

The different existing approaches for offender profiling were created by Peter B. Ainsworth. According to Ainsworth there are four approaches: these are the geographical approach, the investigative psychology, the typological approach and the clinical approach. The first approach, the geographical approach, looks at where and when the crimes took place and might help to find out where the offender lives or works, using this information. The second approach tries to look at the “style of offense” , so how the perpetrator committed his crime. Psychological theories are used to find out possible characteristics of the offender. The third approach talks about getting a closer look of the crime scene. The criminal profiler tries to find certain characteristics of the crime scene to then match these “typical characteristics” to other possible offences. The last approach (clinical approach) tries to determine the mental state of the offender.

When creating an offender profile criminal profilers take five different steps.

1. Crime scene and physical evidence is analysed
2. Nature of the crime is analysed, Which type of crime is it?
3. Background of the victim used to find possible motives, reconstruction of the crime,
4. Offender profile is created and compared with suspects

5. investigation

Today offender profiles are created for all different kinds of crimes. These include serial sexual murder,sexual offenses, arson, organized crime, terrorism and cybercrime. In the past offender profiles were only created for sexual offenses and serial killings.
Most criminal profilers are psychologists or forensic psychologists but many aren't, which is why the validity of offender profiling is questioned very often. Not only the training requirements but also false positives and false negatives resulted in criminal profiling being doubted more often. A very good example for the invalidity of criminal profiling would be the case of the "Beltway Snipers". In the picture below you can see what kind of person the offender profile of this particular case describes and who the real offenders turned out to be.

Well then, now it's your turn! Make up your mind about criminal profiling. What do you think? Is it helpful? Is the room for mistakes too big a risk?