Criminal Profiling Techniques and Applications

• Criminal profiling identifies major personality and behavioral traits based on crime information.

Usefulness of Criminal Profiling

• Focuses limited resources effectively.
• Prevents cases from going cold.
• Identifies crimes committed by the same individual.
• Formulates targeted interview and interrogation strategies.
• Establishes reasons and motives in court.
• Evaluates the threat level someone poses to society.

Criminal Profiling Process

• Profilers analyze crime scenes and victim data.
• They study police and pathologist reports.
• Make inferences about motives and perpetrator identity.

Theoretical Basis of Criminal Profiling

• Relies on the classic trait model of personality, assuming behavior is determined by stable, internal traits.
• Assumes behavioral stability across crimes and contexts. Situational influences may be more accurate predictors of behavior.

Underlying Assumptions of Criminal Profiling

• Offenders behave consistently across crimes (modus operandi).
• There are reliable relationships between crime features and offender characteristics, though not consistently supported.

Ambiguity in Criminal Profiles

• Profiles tend to be general and ambiguous.
• Ambiguity means profiles are open to interpretation and can be reframed.
• Legal professionals may link the same profile to different suspects.

Kocsis and Colleagues Study

• Compared profilers to psychologists, detectives, students, and psychics in terms of accuracy.
• Profilers agreed with solved case findings more than other groups, but accuracy was low overall.

Pinizzoto and Funkel Study

• Compared profilers to students, clinical psychologists, and untrained police officers.
• Profilers studied cases more closely and wrote longer reports.
• Accuracy was low for all; profilers were more successful with sexual offenses because they are linked to mental illness and preferences.

Deductive Criminal Profiling

• Profiles offender characteristics based on crime scene evidence.
• E.g., Assuming the length of fingernails of an offender indicate they play guitar and assuming the use of a blunt object indicates the perpetrator is male.
• Underlying logic can be flawed and susceptible to bias.

Inductive Criminal Profiling

• Profiles offender characteristics based on solved cases.
• E.g., Assuming a murderer of children has a previous criminal conviction and assuming that a rapist will have a pattern of this type of behavior in their past.
• The generalizability of patterns seen in other cases is a limitation.

Organized vs Disorganized Offenders

Holmes and Holmes Offender Classifications

Visionary

• Experiences visions or hears voices instructing them to kill.
• May believe in supernatural powers.
• Often suffers from mental illness.

Mission-Oriented

• Motivated by a desire to eliminate individuals deemed evil.

Hedonistic

• Gains pleasure, often sexual, from torturing victims.

Power-Oriented

• Satisfied by capturing and controlling victims.

Geographic Profiling

• Estimates the perpetrator's likely residence, work location, or the next crime scene.
• Uses maps, statistics, crime patterns, and geographical features.
• Assumes serial offenders stay within a comfort zone.

Key Terms in Geographic Profiling

• Anchor Point: The location from which the offender starts committing crimes.
• Buffer Zone: Area around the offender's home where crimes are less likely.
• Comfort Zone: Area where the offender feels most comfortable committing crimes.
• Distance Decay: The probability of a crime decreases with distance from past crimes.
• Temporal Sequencing: The geographical range of crimes increases over time.

Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System (VICLAS)

• Automated system linking geographically disparate but similar crimes.
• Uses approximately 150 crime characteristics entered by police.
• Accuracy depends on the reliability of entered information.

Key Concepts in ViCLAS

• Crime Linkage: Determining if a single perpetrator committed multiple crimes
• Linkage Blindness: Law enforcement's inability to connect related crimes across jurisdictions.
• ViCLAS aims to reduce linkage blindness.

Policing

• New research area.
• Police require diverse skills, initiative, leadership, empathy, and stress management.

Desirable Characteristics and Testing for Police

• Intelligence: Assessed through qualifications and exams.
• Health and Fitness: Evaluated via fitness tests and medical exams.
• Personality: Assessed using personality tests and interviews.
• Ethical Conduct: Verified through background checks and polygraph tests.
• Predictive validity is important for tests. How is success measured?

Cognitive Bias in Policing

• Preexisting beliefs influence the collection and interpretation of information.
• Largest effect in ambiguous situations where subjective judgment plays a role. Reliance on cognitive biases can be detrimental.

Types of Cognitive Bias

• Confirmation Bias: Seeking evidence that confirms beliefs and ignoring contradictory info.
• Contextual Bias: Irrelevant suggestions sway judgments.
• Hindsight Bias: Believing an outcome was more predictable after it occurred.

Police Discretion

• Leeway to make decisions within general rules.
• Allows tailored responses but can lead to inconsistency and misconduct.

Pros and Cons of Police Discretion

• Pros: Tailored decisions, quick reactions in urgent situations.
• Cons: Inconsistent application of laws, undetected misconduct.
• Ugly: Police misconduct, bias, and error can go undetected, which can cause mental health issues
• Mistakes due to decision processes outside of people's awareness.

Technology, AI, and Policing

• Aims to improve decision-making.
• Distributes decision-making from officers to technology.

Example: Shot-Spotter

• Microphones detect gunshots and alert police with a location.
• Accuracy in sound identification and location determination is important to avoid bias from expectations.

Police Investigations

• Police overestimate their lie detection abilities.
• "Tells" may be misinterpreted.

Investigator Bias

• Police believe deception is more common than it is.
• Police are more confident than laypersons, but not more accurate, in lie detection; more likely to call someone out on lying but not more accurate.
• Training does not improve accuracy.
• Tunnel vision combined with biases can lead to misinterpretations.

Understanding Bias in Police Investigations

• Response Bias: The tendency to choose one option over another, not with any accuracy gain.
• Discrimination: The ability to accurately distinguish between options.

Preventing Cognitive Bias

• Encourage analytical thinking over automatic responses.
• Reduce subjectivity using standardized protocols.
• Use independent decision-makers to check each other's work.
• Expertise alone does not prevent bias. Biases are inherent, automatic, and difficult to prevent.

Who Polices the Police?

• Complex framework of laws, policies, regulations, and case law.
• Oversight by internal and external bodies.
• Civilian oversight in some cases.
• Courts and public opinion play important roles.

Case Example: Tyre Nichols

• Stopped for reckless driving; officers could not substantiate the reckless driving charge.
• Officers used extreme force.
• One officer drew his gun before Nichols tried to flee.
• Officers believed they acted appropriately due to their unit's proactive policing mandate.

Proactive Policing

• Increased police presence in high-crime areas (hot spots).
• Crackdown on lower-level crimes (broken windows theory).
• Allowing stops and searches without a broken law can be problematic.

Alternative Approaches to Proactive Policing

• Community policing: education, regular police presence and communication with an effort to resemble peace and safety.

Predicting Crimes

• Police can stop and search civilians under reasonable circumstances.
• Police and laypersons are equally poor at detecting concealed objects; police were no better at detecting objects.

Results of Predicting Crimes

• Police were more likely to say the person was concealing (response bias).
• In actuality, they (police) were not better able to distinguish between those concealing and those not (discrimination accuracy).
• Behaviors cited were not predictive of concealment. Police training needs to change.

Rights of the Accused

1. Right to be informed of the reasons for arrest/detention.
2. Right to counsel.
3. Right to remain silent.
4. Right to be told about duty counsel and legal aid.

• Individuals not in custody are free to leave.
• Communication of custody is important, impacting individual freedom.

Explore the goals, methods, and applications of criminal profiling. Understand how offender characteristics are inferred from crime scene information. Learn about geographic profiling and the role of ViCLAS in law enforcement.