Psychological profiling of offenders and their motives has been a growing practice, especially throughout homicide crimes. The main issue with profiling is the accuracy that it can provide or does provide or doesn’t provide. It isn’t an exact science, it is probably thought of more of as an intuitive ability. In the article, Investigative Experience and Accuracy in Psychological Profiling of a Violent Crime, Kocsis, R., Hayes, A., and Irwin, H actually empirically assess the accuracy of criminal profiling.
Their data consisted of multiple groups, to include four groups of police officers. One group was comprised of homicide detectives, another group comprised of new detectives in training, new police recruits, another group comprised of senior detectives, a group of people simply interested in this sort of material, and a final group which was comprised of chemistry students. Each group though, had no idea of any additional details about the crime committed, other than what was provided to them, and the crime had already been cracked and closed, so their responses could be compared to the actual answers and outcome of the crime and the offender they were attempting to profile.
All of the groups received the same information and questions. The first group of information was about the crime scene, to include pictures. The second group of information was actually questions asked about the possible past of the offender, habits, and behaviors. There was a third group but that was simply to make sure that none of the participants had any other information than what was provided to them.
The outcome wasn’t what was expected, and that was the data pointing to the chemistry students having the most accurate profiling of the offender, ov...
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...certain guy. These articles do not discount the value of profiling though, and that is not the purpose. The purpose was simply to see what attributes it lends to criminology and what can be improved upon, and what it lacks. Three factual groups that are addressed in the two articles, despite the reasons for the articles, they both came to the same point about profiling: the difficulties, the accuracy, the bias components, and the future possibilities.
Works Cited
Farrell, A., Keppel, R., and Titterington, V. (2011). Lethal Studies: Revisiting What We
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Kocsis, R., Hayes, F., and Irwin, H. (2002). Investigative Experience and Accuracy in
Psychological Profiling of a Violent Crime. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Volume 17, 811. DOI: 10.1177/0886260502017008001
The article Serial killers: II. Development, dynamics, and forensics by Lawrence Miller dives in into the many aspects that encompass the psychological, neurological, and sociocultural elements that underline the average serial murderer. The elements involve childhood upbringing, types of aggression, typical neurochemistry, and subcultural theories. The article manages to include descriptions of the statistical patterns that involve the demographics, and motives that follow serial killers. It also discusses the validity and rationality of the insanity defense in prosecuting these extraordinarily vicious offenders. Serial murderers are an atypical occurrence in the criminal justice system. The uncommon and horrific nature of these crimes are
Criminal Psychology has been referred to as many things, including Sociology and Criminology. The goal of criminal profiling is to be able to look at the crime scene, the victim, and statistics from previous related crimes to make conclusions about traits the suspect may have. Some aspects of criminal profiling are largely scientific and directly relate to psychological practices and facts. Other facets of profiling are based on common knowledge and the ability to relate to what someone else may be thinking or feeling. Criminal Psychology or Psychology in general, for that matter; is not an exact science. Contrary to popular belief or portrayal in pop culture, criminal profilers are not psychic and do not have super...
The focus of a psychologist’s study would be to identify the physical, social, mental and emotional issues within the environment that affect human psyche through a predisposition towards violence. This study would involve evaluation of personal life experiences of gang members, to identify the presence of common stressors and factors. Further investigation would be conducted to establish an understanding of how these factors initiate violence within the psyche.
Although there have been many proposals offered to the logic behind criminals and how they act, the significance of profiling possible suspects are stressed upon by law enforcement in order to achieve and maintain a way to justify the means. Profiling any possible suspects clearly demonstrates that numerous types of individuals follow oth...
Description of offender’s psychological history and functioning at the time of the offence is based on statistical approach which involves the analysis of behavioural and other relevant information found at the scene of crime in order to infer ...
This article gives some examples of crimes and how they were solved using a psychology technique along with how criminal profiling is used to solve crimes and how the profilers know how to slim down the suspects. In the first case, there was a man that planted bombs in multiple places each time writing a note in block letters- signing it F.P. The first bomb was found in 1940, in 1954 he struck four times, and in 1955 five times. In
The data surprised me because nearly half of them know someone who has been brutalized by officers. The one person surprised me because they don't know anyone who has been brutalized . I think this shows we are on the lake Ferguson we're much different than ferguson and these people think so too the data shows people have faith in their law enforcement. After seeing the results the outlier also had many out of the norm responses this makes me think the person didn't take the survey seriously.
McGrath, Michael G. "Criminal Profiling: Is There a Role for the Forensic Psychiatrist?." Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 28. (2000): 315-324. Web. 13 Apr 2011.
Profiling itself has been in use since Jack the Ripper in London during the 1880s. George Phillips and Thomas Bond made predictions about the murderer’s personality based on the information at the crime scene (Winerman, 2004). The FBI now runs the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) and the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) made popular by the television show Criminal Minds. Forensic profilers interact with a large variety of crime, but the focus of this paper will lie on the interaction of profiling and serial killers.
Fascination with murder and murderers is not new, but researchers in recent years have made great strides in determining the characteristics of criminals. Looking back, we can see how naïve early experts were in their evaluations; in 1911, for example, Italian crimin...
Silver, Eric. 2006. “Understanding the Relationship between Mental Disorder and Violence: The Need for a Criminological Perspective.” Law and Human Behavior 30(6):685-706.
Criminal Minds inaccurately dramatizes crimes and criminal profiles compared to what happens in the real world. As a result, society’s connotation of the criminal justice system, concerning criminal profiling, becomes negatively shaped. People who watch Criminal Minds may think to themselves, “Criminal profilers don’t categorize perpetrators in a just manner,” causing them to perceive criminal profilers as something they are not. The episode, “Fear and Loathing (Gordan, 2007),” expresses negative first responses of criminal profilers. In the episode, four deaths take place, all being African-American girls, and as a result, the criminal profilers automatically put a white man on the top of the suspect list without thinking twice about it, and
A large misconception of criminal investigative analysis is that there is a difference between profiling and criminal investigative analysis. Criminal Investigative Analysis is the same tool as criminal profiling and there is no true difference. A survey was done by Torres and the survey consisted of a couple of questions about profiling and about criminal investigative analysis asked to mental health professionals with profiling knowledge. The following table contains the results from the
Understanding Psychology and Crime; Perspectives on Theory and Action, New York. PENNINGTON, D ( 2002) , Introducing Psychology: Approaches, Topics and Methods, London, Hodder Arnold TANNENBAUN, B, (2007),Profs link criminal behaviour to genetics [online] , Available at: http://thedp.com/index.php/article/2007/11/profs_link_criminal_behavior_to_genetics [accessed 16th October 2011]. http://www.docstoc.com/docs/41182390/Explanations-of-Criminal-behaviour
Hollin, C.R.C. (1989). Psychology and Crime: An Introduction to Criminological Psychology. London: Taylor and Francis Group.