Criminal Profiling

Criminal profiling is an important part of a criminal psychology. This part of an article will partially
answer questions about what criminal profiling is, what it is used for, what is aim of it, in which cases
it is mostly used, what are its types and what kind of approaches it has.

In short, Criminal profiling (also known as offender profiling and specific profile analysis) is to create
a psychological and not only psychological portrait, determine location of the offenders by gathering
their personal attributes from crime scene behavior in order to assist in detection of them.

Criminal profiling is typically used when offenders identity is unknown and with serious criminal
offences such as murder, sexual assault. Profilers also work on crime series, where is considered,
that the crime is committed by the same offender.

What creates an offender profile is not clearly agreed, but the process of profiling draws
both, physical and nonphysical information. This includes the layout of the crime scene in terms of
disposition of the victim and the presence or absence of significant items, evidence on what was done
to the victim and the sequence of events,and the perpetrators behavior before and after the crime.
From these data, inferences are drawn about the possible meaning and motivation of particular acts.
For example, tying up a victim may mean a necessity for control, while stabbing the victim before
sexual intercourse may mean a need for arousal from pain or blood. Characteristics of the victim,
location of the crime, use of a vehicle, and relation to previous crimes may also suggest social and
demographic features of the offender, such as race, age or occupation.

The goal is to narrow the field of investigation, basic assumptions are, that an offenders behavior at
the crime scene reflects consistencies in personality and method of committing crime (Holmes,
1989). In the majority of cases Criminal profiling is used in serial crimes and sexual assaults and 90%
of profiling attempts involve murder or rape. Holmes suggests, that profiling is most useful when the
crime scene reflects psychopathology, such as sadistic assaults, rapes or satanic and cut killings.
However, there have been cases of its use in arson, obscene telephone calls and bank robbery.

There are two main directions of Criminal profiling: The profiling of an criminals personal
characteristics and geographical profiling. Most commonly, the first one is what people most
commonly associate with criminal profiling.
A geographical profiler could be asked to identify the location of an offenders home, an offender
profiler might be asked to construct profile of an unknown offender based on his/hers behavior at the
crime scene. A profiler may also be asked to advise police about which particular suspect should be
interviewed and how. In addition to it, Ainsworth has identified four main approaches to criminal
profiling, these are:
 The geographical approach this looks at patterns in the location and timing of offences to make
judgements about links between crimes and suggestions about where offenders live and work.
Investigative psychology this grew out of geographical profiling and uses established
psychological theories and methods of analysis to predict offender characteristics from offending
behavior.
The typological approach this involves looking at the characteristics of crime scenes to assign
offenders to different categories, each category of offender having different typical characteristics.
The clinical approach this approach uses insights from psychiatry and clinical psychology to aid
investigation where an offender is thought to be suffering from a mental illness of other psychological
abnormality.

The Process
The basic assumptions
When profiling characteristics of a person, a offender profiler assumes, that the offenders behavior
is directed by the way he/she thinks and his/her characteristics. Although, how they think how they
behave principle is not flawless, because sometimes an offenders behavior may be affected by
involvement of another person, such as victim or witness and in result a drawing of
an his/her characteristics becomes more complicated. It is the job of a criminal profiler to infiltrate a
behavior that is indicative of a person rather than of the situation.

The process of criminal profiling can be divided into five stages:

1. Profiling inputs

2. Decision processing

3. Crime assessment

4. The offender profile

5. Investigative use

Profiling inputs
This step involves gathering all the information about the crime. This may be any kind of information
that would help understand what happened, how it happened and why. On this stage gathering of
background information about the victim such as his/her employment, activities, friends, habits, social
status, criminal history is also very important.

Decision processing
During this step, all the information gathered in the first stage is being organized in order classify the
crime by type and style. A correct classification will assist profiler in determining the direction of
investigation.
 For the purposes of this step the answer to relevant questions about the crime will help. These may
be:

Where did the action take place?

Why would a person commit the crime, what would his primary motive be?

Why offender might have chosen the specific victim?

What did he/she do in order to reduce the risk of detection, does the offender seem to be amateur
or professional, or at least how intelligent he/she may be?

The FBI has developed its own manual of classification and they have a checklist of symptoms and
by accumulation of their presence the offender will be assigned to a specific classification.

The more specific classification a criminal act falls in the better. For example, a murder can be divided
into many types of classification, such as:

Constant murder (third party)

Gang-motivated murder

Kidnap murder

Drug murder

Insurance related murder with sub-classifications of individual profit and commercial profit

Personal cause homicide with sub-classifications such as domestic homicide, argument/conflict

murder, revenge, nonspecific motive murder, extremist homicide, mercy/hero homicide.

Sexual homicide, which can also be classified as organized, disorganized, mixed, sadistic, elder
female sexual homicide.

Crime assessment
After summarizing all the information gathered in previous steps, the crime assessment is made. The
primary aim of this stage is reconstructing a sequence of events that took place before, during and
after committing a crime and determine the behavior of both, victim and offender.

The offender profile

This stage focuses on hypothesizing about the type of a person who committed an offence. The
created profile will include information, which describes offender. In some examples this information
will include age, sex, location, social status, intelligence, physiological characteristics, etc.

The investigative use

There are two main ways in which an offender profile can help in investigation. Firstly, criminal
profilers make a report for investigators so that they will concentrate their efforts on finding an
offender, that matches characteristics in the profile and secondly it will be used for planning
an interview process of suspects.
It is worth admitting also, that the profile may change during the investigative use.

Flaws:
The use of offender profiling is controversial. Many people dont believe in it, because it is not an
exact science. One of the flaws of offender profiling is Stereotyping. this occurs in a case, when
profiler starts believing something about a person based on small number of characteristics. Many
unsuccessful profiles are created if they are based solely on Stereotyping.

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