Criminal Psychology - Profiling

Profiling

A major part of Criminal psychology, known as offender profiling, began in the 1940s when the United States Office of Strategic Services asked William L. Langer's brother Walter C. Langer, a well renowned psychiatrist, to draw up a profile of Adolf Hitler. After the Second World War British psychologist Lionel Haward, while working for the Royal Air Force police, drew up a list of characteristics which high-ranking Nazi war criminals might display, to be able to spot them amongst ordinary captured soldiers and airmen.

Criminal profiling refers to the process of identifying personality traits, behavioral tendencies and demographic variables of an offender based on characteristics of the crime. This process is dictated by a database collected on previous offenders who have committed similar offenses.

In the 1950s, US psychiatrist James A. Brussel drew up what turned to be an uncannily accurate profile of a bomber who had been terrorizing New York.

The fastest development occurred when the FBI opened its training academy, the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), in Quantico, Virginia. It led to the establishment of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and the violent criminal apprehension program. The idea was to have a system which could pick up links between unsolved major crimes.

In the United Kingdom, Professor David Canter was a pioneer helping to guide police detectives from the mid-1980s to an offender who had carried out a series of serious attacks, but Canter saw the limitations of "offender profiling" - in particular, the subjective, personal opinion of a psychologist. He and a colleague coined the term investigative psychology and began trying to approach the subject from what they saw as a more scientific point of view.

Criminal profiling, also known as offender 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. Profiling is a relatively new area of forensic psychology that during the past 20 years has developed from what used to be described as an art to a rigorous science. Part of a sub-field of forensic psychology called investigative psychology, criminal profiling is based on increasingly rigorous methodological advances and empirical research.

Criminal profiling is a process now known in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as criminal investigative analysis. Pro-filers, or criminal investigative analysts, are trained and experienced law enforcement officers who study every behavioral aspect and detail of an unsolved violent crime scene in which a certain amount of psychopathology has been left at the scene. The characteristics of a good pro-filer are discussed. Five behavioral characteristics that can be gleaned from the crime scene are described: 1) amount of planning that went into the crime, 2) degree of control used by the offender, 3) escalation of emotion at the scene, 4) risk level of both the offender and victim, and 5) appearance of the crime scene (disorganized versus organized). The process of interpreting the behavior observed at a crime scene is briefly discussed.