OFFENDER PROFILING

Offender Profiling



Offender Profiling

“Profilers have a substantial and sustained contribution to make to criminal investigations” (Hicks & Sales, 2006, p.258). Critically evaluate this statement.

This delineation is contentious as it has clear connotations of 'informed guesswork' that has enraged those who support the outlook that offender profiling is a technical and theoretically-informed technique. This disparity of outlooks as to the validity of offender profiling is not restricted to the learned and expert world. Unsuccessful endeavours at profiling have captivated a high grade of newspapers vigilance and this has blended with the less-then-scientific approach of fictional profilers to conceive a equitable degree of scepticism amidst the public considering the validity of offender profiling. This term paper will discover the psychological cornerstone of offender profiling with a outlook to setting up if or not it can be advised a legitimate psychological method with an significant function to play in lawless individual investigation.

This method is illustrated by the summarize of the phases of profiling propounded by Jackson and Bekerian (1997) that commences with facts and numbers assimilation engaging the assemblage of all accessible data about the misdeed that facilitates the second stage of misdeed classification. From this, the profiler is adept to move to the third stage of misdeed reconstruction in which a hypothesis about the demeanour of the offender, the way in which the misdeed was pledged is formed.

The differentiation between modus operandi and signature is an significant characteristic of this third stage which directs to the last stage of profile lifetime in which the profiler is adept to forecast characteristics for example demographic and personal characteristics of the offender as well as character traits and behavioural patterns. This approach encapsulates the way in which offender profiling is founded upon the distinction between dynamic and static facets of character (Andrews and Bonta, 1994:15).

According to Eysenck, persons who are both extroverted and neurotic are expected to need command, have feeble self-discipline and under-developed consciences therefore are not effortlessly controlled by communal pressures. As such, they are expected to enlist in anti-social and lawless individual behaviour. This is because extroverts certainly search stimulation and exhilaration and have a inclination in the direction of impulsive demeanour and this does not blend well with the neurotic's need of emotional steadiness and high grades of anxiety.

Eysenck's idea has formed the cornerstone for many investigations into the connection between character and criminality and these, in turn, have had a deep leverage on the development of profiling techniques. For demonstration, Holmes and de Burger (1989) evolved a typology of successive murderers that was founded upon character kinds while Canter and Allison (2000) accept the leverage of character idea in offender profiling to 'winnow down the most expected suppose from several other possibilities' citing the study into character kinds and the use of tools for fighting of aggression by Lobato (2000) as an exemplar of this.

Lobato utilised Eysenck's dimensions of character catalogue in conjunction with the basic interpersonal relatives orientation idea (FIRO) evolved by Schutz to investigate offenders convicted for brutal ...