Offender Profile Essay

Discussion
The goal of this research was to gain insight into the utility of offender profiles in law enforcement. Profiling is commonly used to prioritize suspects in criminal investigations, though it is often criticized due to its ambiguous nature. Much akin to the results of the Barnum studies, it was found that the suspect information given – both genuine and bogus – was seen as applicable in all possible situations. This is due to the universality of ambiguous statements, which lead the beholder to find even the most miniscule similarities between the two sets of information. As stated above, in order to investigate the way in which ambiguous profiles are interpreted, the participants were arranged into two separate groups: a group categorizing a genuine suspect, and a group categorizing a bogus suspect. All participants received the sale profile file, and all participants rated the profiles on a number of different 10-point scales. These scales included how accurate the profile was in suspect description, how specific the profile statements were in suspect description, and how useful the profile would be in a true investigation.

These results support the expected result, as the majority of participants believed the profile to be useful in criminal investigation. Despite the potential suspects being very different – both in the genuine and the bogus cases – there was believed to be a direct application of the potential profile to the matching of the potential suspect. In the genuine group, the average utility rating of the profile was 7.12/10, and in the bogus group, 7.43. These results suggest that in general, a profile can be interpreted in such a way as to “fit” any potential suspect