What is profiling?

Introduction

Profiling originated in the nineteenth century, when anthropologists hypothesized that criminals’ psychological and physical traits could be correlated. Early efforts revealed that evaluating criminals’ behavioral patterns during a police investigation aided in understanding their motivations and predicting future crimes they might commit and victims they might choose. Such techniques encouraged law-enforcement personnel reliant on traditional criminology methods to comprehend and pursue elusive, anonymous perpetrators.

Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional detective C. August Dupin foreshadowed behavioral profiling in the 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Factual profiling received public attention in the late 1880s in London, when police surgeon Thomas Bond profiled the serial killer Jack the Ripper by reconstructing crime scenes to study behaviors during the murders, such as covering victims’ faces with a sheet and the repetition of wound patterns. Although Bond speculated about the age, demeanor, and appearance of Jack the Ripper, no suspects were ever convicted.

During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), profiled Adolf Hitler’s personality characteristics. Psychiatrist Walter Langer evaluated Hitler’s behavior to help military authorities develop a strategy to interrogate Hitler if he were captured. Langer accurately speculated that Hitler would commit suicide instead of surrendering. In later conflicts, the US military utilized expert profiling of other enemy leaders such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in an attempt to develop military plans to capture them and prevent terrorist actions they sponsored.

In the mid-twentieth century, psychiatrist James Brussels successfully profiled a serial bomber who terrorized New York City. Police were startled that profile details such as the bomber wearing a buttoned, double-breasted suit proved accurate when the criminal was apprehended.

Modern Profiling

The foundation of modern profiling is the realization that behavior reflects personality and that criminal actions satisfy the perpetrators’ psychological or physical needs. Profilers attempt to think like both criminals and victims to comprehend why and how a crime occurred, and the role played in the crime by both perpetrators and victims. Behavioral scientists recognize that although every crime is unique, human behavior matches patterns.

Affiliated with law-enforcement officers who share evidence, profilers use scientific methods supplemented with their instincts about aberrant behavior to create a psychological profile for each murderer. The serial nature of crimes such as kidnapping, rape, molestation, and arson provide profilers with patterns to examine for behavioral consistencies and deviations. Isolated incidents, such as theft, carjacking, and vandalism, are not as successfully profiled.

Computer databases have proven less reliable than profilers’ intuition about specific individuals because of the variability of factors among criminals. Profiling is constantly developing to meet law-enforcement needs. Cyberprofiling seeks to identify people who commit electronic crimes, such as hacking, based on behavior associated with that activity. Profilers choose techniques from several methods that they consider most useful.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation

In the 1960s, Howard Teten, a California police officer, became a US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) special agent and collaborated with Pat Mullany, a specialist in abnormal psychology, to teach how crime-scene evidence revealed behavioral clues. Teten initiated a course on applied criminology at the FBI Academy in 1970. In the late twentieth century, the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) professionalized profiling as a form of forensic psychology. After Teten retired in 1978, director John Douglas and his colleague Robert Ressler emphasized organized (premeditated)/disorganized (impulsive) methodology to evaluate how criminals behaved at crime scenes.

From 1979 to 1983, BSU personnel interviewed prisoners concerning biographical information, their criminal actions, and choice of victims and sites. The BSU agents also collected court, police, and psychiatric records to compile a database useful for future profiling. The FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), established in 1984, helped law-enforcement efforts to detect similar criminal activity in various jurisdictions.

Profiling “Anonymous”

The FBI’s Crime Classification Manual outlines how psychological profiles should be compiled and evaluated. Offender profiling focuses on the behavior of criminals and how they commit crimes, comparing these profiles with established personality types and mental disorders. Investigative profiling studies evidence from crime scenes.

Profiling is a powerful forensic tool to solve seemingly unsolvable cases. When suspects are unknown, profilers can find psychological clues in the choices the culprit made, such as selection and number of victims, crime site, weapons, and alteration of the crime scene by destroying items, displaying bodies, or taking souvenirs.

The first investigation stage involves profiling the victim and noting any associations with the assailant or what the victim might have symbolized to the attacker. Profilers hypothesize how the criminal behaved with the victim and the motivation for the crime, specifically whether it was a planned or an impulsive act and if it was based on anger and the need for power or because of a mental disorder or stimulant abuse. The assailant’s behavior before and after the crime is also explored.

The use of weapons and restraints is evaluated and offers insight into the assailant’s social skills, intellectual abilities, demographic description of race and age, and socioeconomic, marital, and employment status. Profilers speculate about the relationship the criminal has with family members and neighbors and any possible military service. Specific traits such as cowardice and feelings of inadequacy are identified in profiles.

In addition, profilers assess any messages left by the criminal for law-enforcement officers, media, or victims’ family members. They integrate police and autopsy reports and interview survivors and witnesses to consider their perspectives about the assailant’s personality. Profiles provide a psychological identity to guide law-enforcement personnel to find suspects who match specific behavioral patterns.

If they are aware of profiling, some criminals may purposefully alter their behavior to avoid apprehension, although some psychological traits are difficult to hide. Profilers look for any efforts at deception and focus on how offenders’ signatures, which are behaviors not essential to the crime but which satisfy the offender, are present at crime scenes. If a suspect is captured, the profile is essential to the interrogation process.

Investigative Psychology

In 1985, Scotland Yard requested that David Canter help incorporate psychological concepts into investigation methods. Although dubious, Canter successfully utilized environmental psychology methods to identify John Duffy as the so-called Railway Rapist. Canter’s work established investigative psychology (IP) in the United Kingdom. Like the FBI, Canter used statistical information concerning criminal offenders and offenses. His five-factor IP model focuses on how criminals and victims interact.

First, interpersonal coherence examines how criminals act with victims and is based on the assumption that they treat people similarly in both criminal and noncriminal interactions. This factor suggests that victims represent significant people to assailants, such as former spouses or parents, toward whom the criminal is expressing symbolic rage. Second, Canter states that the time and place of crimes is significant to determine facts about the criminal’s lifestyle. Third, criminal characteristics are assessed, although Canter disagrees with the FBI, saying that organized and disorganized classifications of criminals are misleading because a criminal might display both behaviors.

Fourth, Canter says profilers should consider whether assailants have previously been criminally active, and, if so, what crimes they have committed and for what duration they have engaged in a criminal career. Such experiences might have resulted in skills or behaviors demonstrated during the crime that would reduce the number of possible suspects. The final factor is forensic awareness, which assesses whether culprits are knowledgeable enough of investigation procedures for gathering evidence to wear gloves or remove incriminating items from scenes. In addition, Canter’s offender behavior model, the circle theory, describes a marauder model, in which criminals operate from a base, and a commuter model, in which assailants travel to commit crimes.

Behavioral Evidence Analysis

Brent Turvey, a California forensic scientist, developed behavioral evidence analysis (BEA). Unlike other profiling methods, BEA reconstructs criminal events rather than psychologically interpreting an offender’s behavior. By examining police, autopsy, and court records, Turvey recognizes how criminals can appear charming and gregarious but lie. His BEA profiling technique stresses that criminals frequently distort descriptions of their actions, which can influence reconstruction of their criminal behavior.

Four investigative steps occur in two phases. First, equivocal forensic analysis studies evidence to determine its most probable meaning. Second is victimology, in which the role of the victim is analyzed. The third step begins with crime scene characteristics, investigating why that location was chosen and its possible meanings to the criminal. Profilers decide if the site is a primary or secondary crime scene and if victims were moved. The final step focuses on offender characteristics, to assess the criminal’s personality based on the previous three steps.

The investigative phase of BEA occurs when profilers develop a description of an unknown criminal type who is likely to have committed a known crime to provide investigators with leads. The trial phase evaluates evidence when a suspected culprit for a specific crime is known to assist investigators in conducting interrogations.

Public Reaction

Profiling success rates range from 50 to 85 percent. Profilers must objectively examine criminals’ perceptions and how their behavior reveals their motivations without interjecting their moral values. Misrepresentations of profilers, often romanticizing them as being psychic, abound in films, television, fiction, and true-crime books. As a result, many law-enforcement officers ignore or dismiss profiling. Others rely on imprecise profiles. A 1993 profile of the Unabomber based on his victims, which suggested he was highly educated in science and held antitechnology views, was discarded in favor of a profile which said the Unabomber was a blue-collar aviation worker. As a result, the apprehension of mathematician Theodore Kaczynski was delayed because of the focus on invalid suspects.

Critics express concern that innocent people might be falsely arrested, convicted, and imprisoned based on profiles that they consider to be hunches rather than evidence. Such profiling opponents cite errors by leading profilers, including Douglas, who stresses that profiling can be fallible and should not replace a comprehensive investigation. Some people believe local investigators rather than FBI agents should profile suspects. Legal authorities note that, occasionally, organized offenders can leave a disorganized crime scene if they are committing crimes spurred by retaliation, drugs, or domestic violence. Such crime scenes might mislead profilers to describe incorrectly a perpetrator’s behavior.

Many legal courts do not permit profiles to be submitted as evidence during trials because they do not prove an individual committed a specific crime, only that the person fits the profile of someone who could have been the perpetrator.

Nonforensic Psychological Profiles

Noncriminal psychological profiling applications gauge personality characteristics compatible with professional, leisure, and consumer interests. Profiles can alert potential employers about possibly hazardous workers. They can also highlight employees who have the potential to be successful at various tasks. Psychological profiling can be incorporated into therapies to help patients understand their career and entertainment interests and modify their behavior.

Because of increased school violence, some schools are using psychological profiling to identify students who might pose safety risks. This intervention process is considered controversial because it relies on speculation and can unjustly accuse students, because no standard profile for violent students exists and children displaying identified behaviors exhibit them in varying degrees of intensity.

Some psychological profiling is unable to pinpoint assailants because of the diversity of people who exhibit shared psychological characteristics such as road rage. Racial profiling, often heightened after violent acts committed by members of a specific ethnic group, is controversial. Some argue that it is a necessary law enforcement practice while many contend that it infringes on civil rights and is an ineffective way to identify possible culprits.

Bibliography

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