Offender profiling
Offender profiling, also known as criminal profiling, is an investigative strategy used by law enforcement agencies to identify likely suspects and has been used by investigators to link cases that may have been committed by the same perpetrator.
There are multiple approaches to offender profiling, including the FBI's typological method, geographic profiling, and investigative psychology, each utilizing different techniques to analyze offender behavior. Profiling is primarily applied in cases involving violent crimes such as serial murder, sexual offenses, and arson, where behavioral patterns may provide investigative leads.
Despite its use in law enforcement, offender profiling remains controversial, with critics arguing that it often lacks empirical validation, relies heavily on subjective interpretation, and may contribute to cognitive biases in criminal investigations. Advances in forensic psychology and data-driven methodologies continue to shape the field, integrating psychological theories with statistical analysis to improve reliability and accuracy.
The originator of modern profiling was FBI agent Robert Ressler. He defined profiling as the process of identifying all psychological characteristics of an individual and forming a general description of their personality based on an analysis of crimes they have committed.
History
The earliest reference to the use of profiling, according to R.S. Feldman, is Quintilian's essay "Instruction to the Speaker", written in the 1st century AD. It included information about gestures used by people at that time. M. Woodworth and S. Porter believe that the first development on the topic of profiling that should be considered is the notorious Malleus Maleficarum, written in the 15th century, since it contains psychological profiles of alleged witches.There is also an opinion that the first "professional profiler", albeit a fictional one, was C. August Dupin, the protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, who constructed a psychological portrait of the killer. A factual work related to profiling with a scientific approach was Charles Darwin's book, The Expression of Emotions in humans and animals. It contained only a description of external manifestations, but it was a systemization, and thus the beginning of a scientific study of the subject.
An Italian psychologist Cesare Lombroso was a criminologist who attempted to formally classify criminals based on age, gender, physical characteristics, education, and geographic region. When comparing these similar characteristics, he better understood the origin of motivation of criminal behavior, and in 1876, he published the book The Criminal Man. Lombroso studied 383 Italian inmates. Based on his studies, he suggested that there were three types of criminals: born criminals, degenerate criminals and insane criminals who suffered from mental illness. Also, he studied and found specific physical characteristics; some examples included asymmetry of the face, eye defects and peculiarities, ears of unusual size, etc.
One of the first offender profiles was assembled by detectives of the Metropolitan Police on the personality of Jack the Ripper, a serial killer who had murdered a series of prostitutes in the 1880s. Police surgeon Thomas Bond was asked to give his opinion on the extent of the murderer's surgical skill and knowledge. Bond's assessment was based on his own examination of the most extensively mutilated victim and the post mortem notes from the four previous canonical murders. In his notes, dated November 10, 1888, Bond mentioned the sexual nature of the murders coupled with elements of apparent misogyny and rage. Bond also tried to reconstruct the murder and interpret the behavior pattern of the offender. Bond's basic profile included that "The murderer must have been a man of physical strength and great coolness and daring... subject to periodic attacks of homicidal and erotic mania. The characters of the mutilations indicate that the man may be in a condition sexually, that may be called Satyriasis."
In 1912, a psychologist in Lackawanna, New York delivered a lecture in which he analyzed the unknown murderer of a local boy named Joey Joseph, dubbed "The Postcard Killer" in the press.
In 1932, Dr. Dudley Schoenfeld gave the authorities his predictions about the personality of the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby.
In 1943, at the request of the US Office of Strategic Services, psychiatrist Walter C. Langer developed a profile of Adolf Hitler that hypothesized the Nazi dictator's response to various scenarios, including losing World War II. After the war, British psychologist Lionel Haward, while working for the Royal Air Force police, drew up a list of characteristics that high-ranking war criminals might display. These characteristics were used to identify high-ranking war criminals amongst captured soldiers and airmen.
James Brussel was a psychiatrist who rose to fame after his profile of New York City's "Mad Bomber" George Metesky was published in the New York Times in 1956. The media dubbed him "The Sherlock Holmes of the Couch." In his 1968 book, Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist, Brussel relates how he predicted that the bomber would wear a buttoned-up double-breasted suit, but removed the many incorrect predictions he had made in his profile, claiming he had successfully predicted that the bomber would be a Slav who lived in Connecticut, when in fact, he had actually predicted he would be "born and educated in Germany," and live in White Plains, New York. In 1964, Brussel profiled the Boston Strangler for the Boston Police Department.
Modern developments
Offender profiling was first introduced to the FBI in the 1960s, when several classes were taught to the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors.In 1972, after the death of J. Edgar Hoover, who was skeptical of psychiatry, the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI was formed by Patrick Mullany and Howard Teten in 1972, leading to the rapid development of the field. At the BSU, Robert Ressler and John Douglas began an informal series of ad hoc interviews with 36 convicts starting in early 1978.
The BSU later became the Behavioral Analysis Unit. It led to the establishment of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in 1984, of which the BAU is now a part, after Douglas and Ressler created a typology of sexually motivated violent offenders. The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was launched in 1985.
The March 1980 issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin invited local police to request profiles from the FBI. An article in the April 1980 issue, "The Lust Murderer," introduced the dichotomy of "organized" and "disorganized" offenders. The August 1985 issue described a third, "mixed" category.
Investigations of serial killers Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway were performed in 1984 by Robert Keppel and psychologist Richard Walter. They went on to develop the four subtypes of violent crime and the Hunter Integrated Telemetry System database, which compiled characteristics of violent crime for research.
In 1985, Dr. David Canter in the United Kingdom profiled "Railway Rapists" John Duffy and David Mulcahy. David Canter assisted police detectives from the mid-1980s with 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.
The Crime Classification Manual was published in 1992, and introduced the term "criminal investigative analysis."
There was little public knowledge of offender profiling until it was publicized on TV. Later, films based on the fictional works of author Thomas Harris caught the public eye as a profession, in particular Manhunter and Silence of the Lambs.
Theory
Psychological profiling is described as a method of suspect identification that seeks to identify a person's mental, emotional, and personality characteristics based on things done or left at the crime scene. There are two major assumptions made when it comes to offender profiling: behavioral consistency and homology. Behavior consistency is the idea that an offender's crimes will tend to be similar to one another. Homology is the idea that similar crimes are committed by similar offenders.Fundamental assumptions that offender profiling relies upon, such as the homology assumption, have been proven outdated by advances in psychology and behavioral science. The majority of profiling approaches assume that behavior is primarily determined by personality, not situational factors, an assumption that psychological research has recognized as a mistake since the 1960s. Profilers have been noted to be very reluctant to participate in studies of profiling's accuracy. In a 2021 article it was noted that out of 243 cases, around 188 were solved with the help of criminal profiling.
A widely cited study by Mokros and Alison tested the homology assumption using a sample of convicted rapists and found no significant correlation between similarities in crime scene behavior and similarities in offender characteristics such as age, occupation, or criminal history. This research provided strong evidence that offenders with comparable behavioral patterns do not necessarily resemble one another in terms of psychological or demographic profiles. These findings increased doubt on the reliability of using crime scene behaviors to infer specific traits about an unknown offender, calling into question the scientific basis of many profiling practices.