Essay On Offender Profiling

While offender profiling is a significant part of the criminal justice system the exact definition of this practice tends to vary from source to source, overall the general consensus is that it is “an investigative technique by which to identify the major personality and behavioral characteristics of the offender based upon an analysis of the crime(s) he or she has committed” (FBI, 1998). Although having grown in popularity in the recent decades profiling criminals based on behavior patterns is not a new trend, but instead something that has been practiced by law enforcement agencies around the globe going back at least 200 years. One of the first instances of profiling came from Cesaro Lombroso an Italian criminologist who in 1876 published
Thomas Bond a police surgeon who preformed autopsies on the victims was asked to create a report of the killer, Dr. Bond’s process in producing this report is very similar to that of modern day profilers, which included looking over the medical and police reports of the other victims along with recreating the crime scenes, ultimately ‘Jack the Ripper’ was never indentified despite the exhaustive search but Dr. Bond’s profile remains a prominent example of criminal profiling assisting law enforcement in active cases. Since then the practice of criminal profiling has matured significantly going into the 20th century, in 1972 the ‘Behavioral Science Unit’ was established by the FBI and was headed by Dr. Howard Teten who helped implement the plan. The aim of the program was to teach future agents the technique of analyzing unknown offenders by looking for behavioral patterns at the crime scenes, following Teten Robert Reseller became one of the most well-known profilers of the time, studying the crimes of serial offenders, Reseller essentially wrote the book for future profilers along with creating the ‘organized vs. disorganized’ typology method which is still in use