Profilers - Problems

Problems

There are major problems with offender profiling that have been identified.

Incorrect information from profiling can lead to false positives or false negatives. Investigators may find a suspect who appears to fit an incorrect profile and ignore or stop investigating other leads. For example, Richard Jewell was wrongly investigated (and attacked in the media) following the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta. This not only caused great distress to Jewell, but delayed identifying the true culprit, Eric Robert Rudolph. This was a false positive: the profile identified Jewell as the offender when in fact he was not. The opposite of the false positive is the false negative: the profile yields incorrect information which would cause investigators to ignore a suspect who is actually guilty. For example, in the Beltway sniper attacks, the offender profile indicated that the killer was probably a white male in his thirties from the DC area acting alone— in fact, the crimes were perpetrated by two black males, one of whom was 41 and the other 17 years old, from the west coast of the U.S.

The Peggy Hettrick murder case is controversial because it is the only documented case of an individual having been convicted due to a reversed engineered false profile and the erroneous testimony of the psychologist who developed the profile. In 1999, a jury convicted Timothy Masters of the 1987 killing of Peggy Hettrick. Masters spent over 9 years in a Colorado prison before his release on January 22, 2008. Timothy Masters was arrested and convicted of sexual murder based on the testimony of a forensic psychologist while the opinion of a Robert R. "Roy" Hazelwood, a retired FBI criminal investigative analyst was ignored. The forensic psychologist developed a psychological profile of a killer using narrative and drawings made by Masters to conclude that Masters’ supposed fantasy was the motive and behavioral preparation for the sexual murder, regardless of the fact that the forensic psychologist knew that there was no direct or physical evidence linking Masters to the crime. The cautionary lesson in the Masters case is what happens when forensic psychologists advance opinions about criminal matters based on the extrapolation of academic research on psychological concepts involving sexual homicide cases and reject the opinions of professional criminal profilers who incorporate law enforcement analysis coupled with criminal evidentiary considerations into their work.

Some experts in criminal psychology such as Brent Turvey, as quoted by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker have questioned its scientific validity. Many profilers and FBI agents are not psychologists, and some researchers who looked at their work found methodological flaws.

Three psychologists from the Universities of Liverpool and Hull are questioning the basic presumption that you can draw conclusions about a person from a single instance of behaviour under such special circumstances. "The notion that particular configurations of demographic features can be predicted from an assessment of particular configurations of specific behaviors occurring in short-term, highly traumatic situations seems an overly ambitious and unlikely possibility. 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."

Active profiling as allowed by the Department of Justice includes covert alteration of the environment to observe the responses of a suspect. This can be used to check whether the suspect's behavior fits the profile, but risks being labeled as police harassment or entrapment.

Popular use of the term criminal profiler has led to the proliferation of many self-described profilers offering their purported expert opinions on cable news shows in response to incidents capturing national attention in the United States. Such individuals usually have degrees in criminal justice or psychology but lack any law enforcement experience, or vice versa.