An overview of offender profiling

Abstract

Generally speaking, criminals are caught by police for one or more of the following reasons: they confess to the crime; another criminal gives the police useful information about a crime; they are arrested red-handed or chased and caught by police; an eyewitness describes them; forensic evidence (fingerprints, footprints, DNA, etc.) at the crime scene or their handwriting or video footage is linked to them; or finally, because the police link a number of crimes committed by the same offender. Further, in today's large urban centres all over the world, the work of police detectives is becoming increasingly difficult, calling for more sophisticated techniques as criminals become even more adept. Films such as Silence of the Lambs, television series like Cracker in the UK, Mindhunter, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Miami or Profiler, and popular books like The Real Cracker by Stephen Cook (2001), The Jigsaw Man and Picking Up the Pieces by Paul Britton (1998, 2001) have popularised criminal profiling. In addition, well-known retired Federal Bureau of Investigation profilers (e.g. John Douglas, Roy Hazelwood, Robert Ressler) have published some of their experiences in helping law enforcement agencies catch serial killers. Likewise, in the UK, two very experienced offender profilers have published works; namely, academic psychologist Julian Boon and psychiatrist Richard Baddock. Offender profiling refers to the use of behavioural data evident in a crime to assist a police investigation by seeking to infer attributes of probable offenders, thus narrowing the police search for suspects.

Introduction

Generally speaking, criminals are caught by police for one or more of the following reasons: they confess to the crime; another criminal gives the police useful information about a crime; they are arrested red-handed or chased and caught by police; an eyewitness describes them; forensic evidence (fingerprints, footprints, DNA, etc.) is found at the crime scene or their handwriting or video footage is linked to them; or, finally, because the police link a number of crimes committed by the same offender. Further, in today's large urban centres all over the world the work of police detectives is becoming increasingly difficult, calling for more sophisticated techniques as criminals become even more adept.

Films such as Silence of the Lambs, television series like Cracker in the UK, Mindhunter, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Miami or Profiler, and popular books like The Real Cracker by Stephen Cook (2001), The Jigsaw Man and Picking Up the Pieces by Paul Britton (1998, 2001) have popularised criminal profiling. In addition, some well-known retired Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) profilers (for example, John Douglas, Roy Hazelwood, Robert Ressler) have published some of their experiences in helping law enforcement agencies catch serial killers. Likewise, in the UK, two very experienced offender profilers have published works: academic psychologist Julian Boon and psychiatrist Richard Baddock.

Offender profiling refers to the use of behavioural data evident in a crime to assist a police investigation by seeking to infer attributes of probable offenders, thus narrowing the police search for suspects (Crighton, 2010; Kocsis, 2006).

A brief history of profiling

Of course, offender profiling is not new and can be found in the attempt by police surgeon Thomas Bond to profile ‘Jack the Ripper’ in Whitechapel in the East End of London in the 1880s; in fictional characters like Arthur Conan Doyle's (1887) Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot; and in the kidnapping of Charles Lindberg Jr in the 1920s. Further, profiling was utilised in the psychological assessment of Adolf Hitler by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in the Second World War and in the cases of the Mad Bomber in New York and the Boston Strangler in the 1950s and 1960s (Brussel, 1968). Not surprisingly, therefore, as profiling offenders has evolved over more than a century, a number of schools of thought/approaches to profiling have developed (Fox et al., 2020). Four primary approaches to offender profiling exist as detailed below.

Diagnostic evaluation

This is a clinical perspective on profiling offenders, whereby a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist, for example, ‘relate or diagnose possible psychopathologies indicative of the behaviours evident in a crime and from this [to] extrapolate some understanding of the probable offender’ (Kocsis, 2009). An often quoted and early example of diagnostic evaluation is from New York City in 1956, when psychoanalytic psychiatrist James A. Brussel (1968) came up with a list of characteristics of the person likely to be the ‘mad bomber’ on the basis of a crime scene examination and letters written by the bomber. These characteristics were: middle-aged male, heavy, single, foreign born, perhaps living with a sibling, having some basic mechanical skills, coming from Connecticut, a Roman Catholic immigrant, having an obsessional love for his mother but hating his father and, finally, wearing a buttoned-up double-breasted suit.

When a number of years later, the ‘mad bomber’, George Metsky, was arrested by the police, he was living in Connecticut and fitted Brussel's description to the last detail. However, profiling offenders using the diagnostic evaluation method is largely subjective and falls short of the professionalism required in the critical environment of a major crime investigation (Fox and Farrington, 2018).

Criminal investigation analysis (FBI method)

Howard Tenten and colleagues in the Behavioral Science Unit developed a methodology called criminal investigation analysis. In the 1970s, members of the Behavioral Sciences Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia carried out research into a number of serial violent offenders, including serial sexual killers. The FBI unit's research focus, which has come to form the foundation of criminal investigation analysis as practised today, was on the crimes, motivations, personalities and behaviours of 32 serial killers (almost exclusively sexual) who they interviewed in prison, on the assumption that every offender commits a crime in a certain way and leaves their signature at the scene of the crime (Douglas and Burgess, 1986; Douglas and Olshaker, 1995). The methodology used combined low-level quantitative analysis and the unit's own collective experience over the years with constructing offender profiling. On the basis of that work, a database was constructed that allowed the FBI researchers to propose a typology of such offenders into ‘organised’ and disorganised’.

An ‘organised’ killer shows planning of the crime(s) and control at the scene of the crime, leaving very useful clues behind as to their demographic characteristics, personality and motive. An organised murderer would thus be expected to be intelligent (but a likely underachiever), with good interpersonal skills, sexually competent, living with a partner and appearing ‘normal’, but harbouring an antisocial or psychopathic personality, who was probably experiencing anger at about the time of the killing, been depressed, follows media accounts of their murders and may well return to the scene of the crime (Hazelwood and Douglas, 1980). By contrast, a ‘disorganised’ murderer is a totally disorganised individual as far as appearance, lifestyle and psychological state are concerned.

The FBI's criminal investigation analysis, however, has been criticised by Stevens (1997) for being based on weak social science methodology; relying largely on the individual profiler's intuition and, consequently, not being objective, let alone ‘scientific’; and, finally, that two profilers using the same crime scene analysis data often produce different profiles.

The criticisms levelled against the FBI's criminal investigation analysis method must be weighed against its contribution, sometimes bringing to justice serious criminals who terrorise whole communities. Also, we should not forget that profiling is but one tool available to police investigators.

As Stevens (1997: 77) reminds us: ‘Crime is not solved by magic. Crime is solved by hard work and determination on the part of highly skilled and professional police officers, often working with equally professional colleagues in the scientific, medical and legal fields’. It has been shown time and time again that a highly skilled and experienced profiler can assist police investigators immensely in catching serious offenders. At the same time, the police can be sent on a wild goose chase by an inaccurate profile.

Crime action profiling

Crime action profiling is very similar to criminal investigation analysis, but uses statistical techniques such as multidimensional scaling to develop models ‘in which crime behaviours are correlated with various offender characteristics and thus operate as mechanisms by which the perpetrators of future crimes may be profiled’ (Kocsis, 2009: 220).

Investigative psychology

Like crime action profiling, investigative psychology is a research-based approach to profiling offenders that has, largely under the aegis of Professor David Canter (1995a, 1995b, 2003), evolved into a specialised discipline. Canter is known to many for his contribution in the case of Peter Duffy, the ‘railway murderer’, who in the 1980s carried out a series of terrifying rape and murder attacks on women in London and the Home Counties. Investigative psychology researchers are interested in patterns in a broad range of criminal behaviour that can aid criminal investigators and not in inferring offender motivations (Canter and Heritage, 1990).

The following is an example of investigative psychology in action. In a study of serial homicide in Italy, Santtila et al. (2008) analysed data from court files and media reports to investigate the behavioural crime link using observable crime features (offence and victim characteristics) of 116 homicides committed by 23 individual offenders between 1970 and 2000. Santtila et al. reported a classification accuracy for the cases of 62.9%, further showing the potential usefulness of such crime analysis to police investigators. Statistical profiling has been applied to a broader range of offences than psychological profiling (Howitt, 2002).

From an objective, often statistical, viewpoint rather than one based on personal intuition and clinical experience (Canter and Alison, 2000), investigative psychology has been applied to, for example, homicide, burglaries, armed robbery, arson and theft at work. Salfati and Canter (1999) examined the relationship between murder crime scenes and the characteristics of the murderer in their study of a sample of 82 homicides in England in which a single offender attacked a stranger.

Current developments in offender profiling

Today, profiling has moved from the early criminal investigative analysis to a more evidence-based approach and into mainstream forensic psychology. Furthermore, profiling in the UK has become a recognised profession, namely behavioural investigative adviser (BIA) (Rainbow, 2011), and the discipline that has emerged is termed behavioural investigative advice. The term BIA has replaced ‘offender profiler’ and the working conditions, professional and ethical standards of BIAs are regulated at a national level by the National Police Chiefs Council. The working conditions list a number of minimum requirements concerning report content and detail the criteria on the basis of which reports are evaluated.

A BIA with National Crime Agency approved status agrees to have his or her work audited annually by a suitably qualified independent panel. Finally, for full-time BIAs employed within the National Crime Agency, there is a BIA roadmap for development. The work of BIAs is greatly assisted by the existence of systematic structured electronic databases pertaining to offender characteristics such as the Child Abduction and Serial Murder Investigative Resource Center (CASMIRC) and Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) in the US and the Violent and Sexual Offender Register (VISOR ) in the UK.

The criminal and his environment: Geographic profiling

Geographic examination of crime has been around since the early 1970s (see Reppetto, 1974). Geographic profilers, whether drawing on geography or environmental psychology, analyse related crime locations to identify a specific area that may be linked to the perpetrator(s) of the offences. This approach to profiling places has been greatly assisted by the availability of computer programs such as Geographical Information Systems that generate geographic profiles (Rossmo, 2000).

Interest in the ecology of crime can be traced to the Chicago School (see Shaw et al., 1942), which emphasised that crime (in their case, delinquency) was concentrated in some areas of the city, a finding that led them to postulate ‘social disorganisation’ as a cause of delinquency. It is widely accepted that most offenders, including serial killers, do not travel very far from their place of residence to commit their crimes and detailed mapping of crime locations, patterns and trends, a method known as ‘crime mapping’, can provide police investigators with very useful information about suspects (Rossmo, 1997).

There is both geographical profiling (spatial movement analysis of a single serial offender) and geographical mapping (special patterns analysis pertaining to a number of offenders over time) (Rossmo, 1997). The main idea behind geographical profiling is to offer investigators probability estimates of where a suspect's residence might be. A computer program known as Criminal Geographic Targeting, developed by Rossmo (1995), analyses the special characteristics of an offender's crimes to produce a topographic map, assigning probabilities to different locations where the suspect may be residing or have a base for offending. Drawing on Rossmo (1997), a geographic profile can be used in combination with a psychological profile to help investigators have a fairly good idea who they should be looking for. Of course, not all types of offenders or offence types can be profiled geographically.

Victim search methods

Geographical profiling also enables the production of hunting typology for predatory criminals, breaking the serial killer’s hunting process into two components: (a) the search for a suitable victim, and (b) the method of attack.

Rossmo (1997: 167) identified four victim search methods: hunter (goes in search of a victim); poacher (searches for a victim away from the area normally frequented); troller (while doing something unrelated, encounters a victim and, availing himself of the opportunity presented, attacks the victim); and trapper (puts himself in a situation where he/she comes across victims over whom he has control).

Rossmo also identifies three methods of victim attack: raptor (comes across a victim and attacks right away); stalker (follows the victim and then attacks); and finally, ambusher (entices a victim to a location the offender controls such as his car, flat, shop).

But what do we know about the accuracy of profiling methods and are profilers successful? Concerning the evidence base for offender profiling, according to Kocsis (2009: 226), evidence addressing the utility of criminal profiling in assisting with crime detection is, not surprisingly perhaps, as scant as the evidence for the accuracy of profiles, which raises the issue of the qualities of successful profilers. The work of Kocsis and colleagues supports the view put forward by FBI profiler Hazelwood (1995) that successful profilers have especially logical minds and an appreciation of the criminal mind. According to Rainbow (2011), offender profiling: (a) has progressed from the early clinical and criminal investigative analysis approaches to a more evidence-based approach; (b) has led to the development of offender profiling as a recognised profession (BIA) employed within the National Crime Agency in the UK that is regulated by the National Police Chiefs Council; and (c) police crime profilers today can draw on offender and offence electronic databases such as VISOR in the UK and ViCAP in the US. However, despite the large number of publications on offender profiling since the 1980s and improvement in the approaches used, there remains a lack of: (a) evaluations of the usefulness of profiles in police criminal investigations and arrest rates in unsolved cases using an experimental design; and (b) cost–benefit analyses of the use of offender profiles (Fox et al., 2020: 24).