Offender profiling
He defined profiling as the process of identifying all psychological characteristics of an individual and forming a general description of their personality based on an analysis of crimes they have committed.
[5] There is also an opinion that the first "professional profiler" was the protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue (published 1841), who used the method of constructing a psychological portrait of the killer.
[6] The first work with a scientific approach (at the level of the 19th century) was Charles Darwin's book, The Expression of Emotions in humans and animals (1872).
[7] An Italian psychologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) was a criminologist who attempted to formally classify criminals based on age, gender, physical characteristics, education, and geographic region.
Also, he studied and found specific physical characteristics; some examples included asymmetry of the face, eye defects and peculiarities, ears of unusual size, etc.
[9] One of the first offender profile was assembled by detectives of the Metropolitan Police on the personality of Jack the Ripper,[10] a serial killer who had murdered a series of prostitutes in the 1880s.
Police surgeon Thomas Bond was asked to give his opinion on the extent of the murderer's surgical skill and knowledge.
[1] Bond's assessment was based on his own examination of the most extensively mutilated victim and the post mortem notes from the four previous canonical murders.
[11] In his notes, dated November 10, 1888, Bond mentioned the sexual nature of the murders coupled with elements of apparent misogyny and rage.
[11] Bond's basic profile included that "The murderer must have been a man of physical strength and great coolness and daring... subject to periodic attacks of homicidal and erotic mania.
"[12] In 1912, a psychologist in Lackawanna, New York delivered a lecture in which he analyzed the unknown murderer of a local boy named Joey Joseph, dubbed "The Postcard Killer" in the press.
[14]: 229 In 1943, Walter C. Langer developed a profile of Adolf Hitler that hypothesized the Nazi dictator's response to various scenarios, including losing the war.
Later, films based on the fictional works of author Thomas Harris caught the public eye as a profession, in particular Manhunter (1986) and Silence of the Lambs (1991).
The fastest development occurred when the FBI opened its training academy, the Behavioral Analysis Unit, in Quantico, Virginia.
[15] In 1972, after the death of J. Edgar Hoover, who was skeptical of psychiatry,[14]: 230–231 the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI was formed by Patrick Mullany and Howard Teten.
[24] Investigations of serial killers Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway were performed in 1984 by Robert Keppel and psychologist Richard Walter.
[25] At the FBI's BSU, Robert Ressler and John Douglas began an informal series of ad hoc interviews with 36 convicts starting in early 1978.
[33][34] The majority of profiling approaches assume that behavior is primarily determined by personality, not situational factors, an assumption that psychological research has recognized as a mistake since the 1960s.
[38][39] Critics question the reliability, validity, and utility of criminal profiles generally provided in police investigations.
Officers were able to find truth in whichever profile they viewed, believing it accurately described the perpetrator, demonstrating the presence of the Barnum effect.
One practitioner, Turco, believed that all violent crimes were a result of the mother-child struggle where female victims represent the offender's mother.
[30] The Scientific approach relies heavily on the multivariate analysis of behaviors and any other information from the crime scene that could lead to the offender's characteristics or psychological processes.
[30] Wilson, Lincon and Kocsis list three main paradigms of profiling: diagnostic evaluation, crime scene analysis, and investigative psychology.
Labuschagne states that in gathering and incorporating these aspects of the offender's crime pattern, investigators must engage in five assessment procedures: 1.
[35] The usage of profiling has been documented in Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, South Africa, Germany, Canada, Ireland, Malaysia, Russia, Zimbabwe, and the Netherlands.
"[37] Profiling's continued popularity has been speculatively attributed to broad use of anecdotes and testimonials, a focus on correct predictions over the number of incorrect ones, ambiguous profiles benefiting from the Barnum effect, and the popular appeal of the fantasy of a sleuth with deductive powers like Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes.
Switzerland has only recently adopted ViCLAS, the computerized Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System, and is now training its own case analysis specialists (1,14,15) In a review of the literature by Eastwood et al. (2006),[36] one of the studies according to, Pinizzotto and Finkel (1990),[55] showed that trained criminal profilers did not do any better than non-profilers in producing an accurate profile.
[57][22] There is a lack of clear, quantifiable evidence of a link between crime scene actions (A) and offender characteristics (C), a necessary supposition of the A to C paradigm proposed by Canter (1995).
Thus, until such inferential processes can be reliably verified, such claims should be treated with great caution in investigations and should be entirely excluded from consideration in court.
