Who Are Criminal Profilers? Rebecca Wiltshire Colby-Sawyer College Criminal profilers mix both the world of psychology with criminal justice. The field itself is fairly new and often time’s profilers don't always agree on methodology or even terminology. The term "profiling" is popular among the public because of media interoperations such as “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Criminal Minds”. However the FBI calls its form of profiling “criminal investigative analysis”; another profiler, a prominent forensic psychologist, calls his work “investigative psychology”; and another calls his “crime action profiling” only further proving the lack of agreement in terminology (8).
Introduction: Criminological theories are paradoxically fascinating, frustrating, and nebulous. They are fascinating in that almost everyone has an opinion, sometimes a very strong opinion, on what causes crime. They are frustrating because crime and human nature are too complex for one theory to explain them accurately and comprehensively. Therefore, when one studies criminological theories, criminology as a whole becomes nebulous, confusing, and incomplete. However, choice theories of crime resonate with a conservative person’s sense of right and wrong, common sense, and ability to understand crime causation so that it is not viewed as irrelevant, impractical, academic drivel.
I firmly believe that police brutality is too often overlooked. And I also believe that I will one day expose the chinks in the armor of the New York Police Department. Police brutality is the act of a law officer abusing a citizen either through physical contact, verbal assaults, or threats. Police brutality is often referred to as an over excessive use of force. Some would believe that this abusive force may sometimes be necessary for criminals that seriously need to be apprehended and are not complying with orders, but that force should only extend to a certain degree, which is just enough to subdue that criminal.
Criminals especially those who are going through court proceedings may not feel comfortable disclosing certain information to someone they know to be a researcher. Typically most researchers are similar to police in characteristics, white and middle class, so acting covertly will most likely increase comfortability between the researcher and criminals, allowing more valid research to be acquired. Similarly judges and police may alter their behaviours if they know the researchers true identity in a bid to disguise any flaws in their practices and unjustified law enforcing. However, Positivists would argue that data collected by covert observations aren’t at all valid, they are biased as they are based off of the observer’s interpretations. This could be especially true in the case of researching court proceedings as it is unlikely many researchers have gone through one themselves.
From this type of profiling an offender can be categorized as organized nonsocial offenders and disorganized asocial offenders. The killing from theses two types of offenders would produce two different crime scenes, one of complete chaos and plenty of evidence all over and another with little evidence and more controlled. A major benefit from using this type of profiling is that it let investigators know what kind of offender they will be dealing with so they know how to proceed with the case and interrogate them. A limitation from this type of profiling can be that too much attention is paid to the physical evidence and not on the nonphysical (Holmes & Holmes,
Eysenck’s personality theory states criminal behaviour is a result of genetics and the nervous system. Those with extrovert personalities are more likely to commit crime. These personalities are as a result of the RNS dampening down the nervous system which makes the person seek stimulation which they find in crime such as fighting and joy riding. Furthermore Eysenck goes on to say that those with Neuroticism are also more likely to commit more crime due to adrenaline being forced in to the blood stream by the ANS. Eysenck has conducted personality and genetic studies which support his theory., criminals and non-criminals were compared and crimples were found to score more highly on the P and N scale.
The fact that officers know that illegally obtained (but true) evidence will quite possibly be thrown out, and therefore dangerous criminals will be freed, will encourage them to follow the proper procedures. (Woodfin, 2009) In addition, there are already several exceptions to requiring a warrant, such as “stop-and-frisk”, airport and school searches, voluntary searches, and emergency situations (Scheb, 2008) While these arguments supported the continued use of the exclusionary rule, there are also many argue against its value to our criminal justice system. One of the most
Although this type of profiling might be useful to some crimes, it is limited to crimes that leave significant evidence e.g. serial murder, rape, arson, satanic crimes and paedophilia. Crimes that are rare but still horrific so it’s helpful if profiling helps solve these crimes. The rarity of these crimes also means that there is little support for this type of technique. Profiling has also been criticised for being far from guaranteeing a conviction.
A "profile" is a coherent set of facts - known conditions and observable behavior that indicate a particular individual may be engaged in criminal activity. The technique of "profiling" is a well-known and long-standing law enforcement tactic. In fact racial profiling can make us less safe. Multiple studies have shown that when police focus on factors such as race, they tend to pay less attention to actual criminal behavior. This is a dangerous trend that can inhibit effective law enforcement and ultimately endanger the lives of all persons who depend on law enforcement for protection.
For something to be valid it has to assess what it is supposed to assess (Psychology for the VCE student, 2005), therefore personality profiling when in correlation with criminal profiling is a valid tool. When something is reliable it means that it has an ability to assess what it is supposed to be assessing affectively and consistently (Psychology for the VCE student, 2005). Criminal profiling can never be one hundred percent reliable because it is only a profile that the police can use to narrow their search. There are many criminal profiling theories that can be related to personality theories. Organized/Disorganized dichotomy developed by John Douglas and Robert Ressler can be linked to Eysenck’s personality theory.