Psychological Profiling Analysis

The American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), lay claim to creating offender profiling and although there is no universally agreed definition (Snook et al., 2007:439), the fundamental idea is the same throughout. Profiling aims to offer the probable description of a likely offender, after an analysis of a crime scene, the victims and the evidence available. Dwyer describes it as "one of the most controversial and misunderstood areas of criminal detection" (2001:47), and it is agreed that profiling does not solve crimes, but narrows down the range of potential suspects (Dwyer, 2001:49; Ainsworth, 2013:8). Due to the definition being so broad, it is also relevant to note that "not all claims are equal" and there are factors within profiling
This paper will be split into four parts and focus on psychological profiling throughout in order to give a more in depth analysis. The first part of this paper will give a brief analysis of psychological profiling and review the concerned literature, whilst explaining the effects that profiling has on miscarriages of justice. The second part will look at the ways the psychological profiling helps to avoid miscarriages of justice. However, due to the shortage of literature, the paper will evaluate a number of relevant cases. The third part of this paper proposes suggestions for future research; it will then summarise and
The criminal justice system is naive in when it comes to profiling (Alison et al., 2002:115, Alison et al., 2007:497), not taking into account the variations of individuals which seemingly do not correlate with socio demographic features (Alison et al., 2007:499). Alison and Ogan (2006, cited in Alison et al., 2007:498) argue this and suggest that human behaviour should not be categorised and go on to propose a more dimensional outlook, describing a range of levels. Their research takes into account maturity levels of the individual by discussing ages, intelligence levels, and socio economic groups. Canter et al. (2004:312) research further supplements this, in their study concerning the typology of serial murderers, and they conclude that the majority of examples contained both elements of 'disorganised ' and 'organised '. However, any profiling of this type still needs consistency for it to work and this is assumed, throughout all types of profiling. Although contentious, (Alison et al., 2007:499) 'homology ' delves further into the personality characteristics of an offender, and explains that two similar crime scenes that would be linked with other types of profiling could in fact be two different offenders with similar personalities. This however, also has