What is Profiling?

Profiling came into the public eye with the debut of the popular show Criminal Minds which has been renewed for a tenth season. According to Lilienfeld et al. (2014) practitioners use information derived from patterns of crimes to determine the motives and personality traits of the offender. Law enforcement has used profiling techniques for the last thirty years but little empirical scientific research has been conducted on the validity of actual techniques used by profilers. Most articles are instead, discussion pieces about the perception of profiling within the law enforcement field. In this paper, I am examining two studies which focus on the perception of profiling by members of the law enforcement profession.

Richard N. Kocsis, with other authors, conducted a number of studies about perceptions about profiling. In an early 2004 study, in which police offers were subjects, he discovered bias. One of the study criteria involved the profile used in the study as either being generated by a professional or non-professional profiler. The identity of the author did not appear to influence the officers' opinion regarding the usefulness of the profile but did affect the perceptions of the accuracy of the profile. Two reasons were given for this. One of these, professional loyalty, causes the officers to give more weight to the work of a fellow professional as opposed to that of an outsider. The second reason relates to the beliefs of the officers regarding profiling. This phenomena has been labelled as the P. T. Barnum effect which also notes the tendency of people to positively interpret vague material presented in a positive manner such as horoscopes and personality tests (Lilienfeld et al. 2014).

In the later study, Kocsis a...

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...paper submitted in 2008, calls for the burden of proof to be borne by those in the field who claim that profiling is a legitimate science and that claims must be scientifically tested for validity (Snook et al. 2008).

REFERENCES

Bennell, C., Jones, N., Taylor, P., Snook, B. (2006). Validities and abilities in criminal profiling: a critique of the studies conducted by Richard Kocsis and his colleagues. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology. 50, 344-360.

Snook, B., Cullen, R., Taylor, P., Gendreau, P. (2008). The criminal profiling illusion: what's behind the smoke and mirrors. Criminal Justice and Behaviour. 35, 1257-1271.

Torres, A., Boccaccini, M., Miller, H. (2006). Perceptions of the validity and utility of crimianl profiling among forensic psychologists and psychiatrists. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice. 37, 51-58.