History
The origins of profiling can be traced back to as early as the Middle Ages, with the inquisitors trying to "profile" heretics. Jacob Fries, Cesare Lombroso, Alphonse Bertillon, Hans Gross and several others realized the potential of profiling in the 19th century although their research is generally considered to be prejudiced, reflecting the biases of their time. A version of profiling is thought to have been used in the 1940s, when investigations relied on mental health professionals to create a profile of an offender in order to aid the police investigation. Soon after, as discussed below, James Brussel was called upon to analyze the information on the Mad Bomber in New York City, and he created an accurate profile of the offender. This caught the attention of the FBI, who then worked to develop a technique for profiling, based on the process used by Brussel.
Read more about this topic: Offender Profiling
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.”
—Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)
“There are two great unknown forces to-day, electricity and woman, but men can reckon much better on electricity than they can on woman.”
—Josephine K. Henry, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 15, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)