Critically analyse the use of Clinical Profiling or Criminal Investigative Analysis or Investigative Psychology in police investigation. Illustrat...

INTRODUCTION

Since the beginning of the human society the need for references in the behaviour of each individual have been established, passed down and evolved through time and along generations. This gave rise to a specificity of the human’s framework of behavioural patterns. For instance we will focus on what we call crime. According to Herbert Packer (1968, pg 364) crime is dependent on the perception and perspective of what the society labels or define as criminal occurrence. According to him, crime is a concept of social and political creation. Therefore, crime leads to a reaction that can be mainly described as the need of comprehension of its existence. This can be done by adopting various perspectives and methods, like through criminal profiling methods.

Criminal profiling is also a concept that has known evolution through decades. It made its apparition during the middle Ages. Even through it was at a primitive scale of understanding, it evolved and it was only during the 19th century that it was attempted in a truly systematic fashion. The concept has been adopted in the sense that it could take part in many other social and institutional processes. Indeed, it has been used in accordance to advancement in criminology and scientific or professional progress for the creation of crime prevention strategies or even in the judicial institutional branches.

Since then, criminal profiling has become a developing science of practice to solve or help in investigation by using various methods, one of which is known as investigative psychology.

INVESTIGATIVE PSYCHOLOGY (IP)

I. THE CONCEPT

The main character of this technique can be described as being the implementation of a framework for the diversity of known aspects of psy...

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...red important in the identification of the offender

Distinguishing between offenders; questioning the reliability of the investigators in their ways of indicating the differences between crimes and offenders.

Inferring characteristics; which considers the accuracy and precision in the searching and evaluation of findings about the characteristics of the offender that are productively useful in process of identification of offenders.

Linking offences; which considers the possibility of one offender for two or more criminal offences. Therefore, questioning the support evidence and the ways inference was made to reach such conclusion. Indeed, as said above, salience in investigation is very difficult to ensure. Indeed, in the case study above, the offender confessed many other crimes that the police did not link to him and is known to have committed 234 serious crimes.