Profiling

Definition

Profiling (also known as offender profiling, crime scene profiling, psychological profiling, and personality profiling) is the process of linking an offender's actions at the crime scene to their most likely characteristics to help police investigators narrow down and prioritize a pool of most likely suspects. Investigators' efforts are focused on matching an offender's behavior in one situation to behaviors or characteristics in another situation.

Psychologists are sometimes called on during a police investigation to analyze the behavioral indicators of the crime and, based on these, to draw up a profile of the most likely characteristics of an offender responsible for such actions. In addition, psychologists continue to be involved in researching the processes of profiling itself, so as to establish its validity and utility as a police investigation tool.

Development

Although profiling was attempted as long ago as the mid-1880s, in the Jack the Ripper serial murder case in London, profiling as it is known today is a relatively new area in forensic psychology. Much of the early work in profiling dates back to the 1970s and 1980s, when there was an initiative to focus on analysis of the crime scene itself. Most of this work, typically done by practicing clinicians or police investigators, was based on understanding an individual's behavior at the crime scene through interviews with actual offenders and primarily focusing on the offender's internal motivations and drives, in addition to identifying specific behaviors.

With its increasing popularity through the 1980s, and also with more recent efforts to bring profiling into court as evidence, the method came under increasingly close scrutiny by researchers within the field. Consequently, the 1990s saw the creation of a new area of forensic psychology, investigative psychology, spearheaded by David Canter and colleagues, that focuses on the contribution of psychology to police investigations. Researchers in this growing field have stressed the importance of providing a solid methodological approach and framework for establishing an empirically based science testing the psychological principles on which profiling rests.

Early evaluation studies of the emerging field of profiling showed that extant models of criminal behavior were mostly unsubstantiated and not founded on rigorous scientific study. Other work evaluating actual written profiles showed that these included much unsubstantiated information. Based on these results, researchers in profiling have emphasized the importance of empirically validated research to establish a link between the actions of offenders at the crime scene and their corresponding characteristics.

Components

The main psychological premise behind profiling is that there will be consistency between the way offenders act at the crime scene and who they are. This is based on the broader findings from longitudinal studies and cross-situational consistency in general as well as from findings on the development of criminal behavior. By understanding consistencies in offenders' development and change over time, the suggestion is that we can link the way they behave at the crime scene with how they have previously behaved in different contexts. Three general interlinked areas have been the focus of recent profiling research: individual differentiation, behavioral consistency, and inferences about offender characteristics.

...