Essay On Criminal Profiling

Societies’ Misconceptions Concerning Criminal Profiling Media attention on understanding the psyche of the criminal mind – lawbreaker’s behavioral and mental processes, culture identity, and daily routines – has made a recent resurgence in America’s society. However, recent findings are questioning the validity of criminal profiling, and its ability to accurately contribute to identifying criminals using psychology. Rather, it seems to be founded on conjecture and the ability to make educated guesses. It is a myth that criminal profiling is a useful psychological tool which helps aide the law in solving cases. Generally, people give criminal profiling more credit than it is due, while there is actually very little evidence to support its
Mr. Crowell believes that profiling is useful because it can eliminate subjects based on acts of criminal violence: “It helps narrow the suspect list, and it’s ideal for finding patterns in cases that involve serial killers, like Ted Bundy.” He believed that without offender profiling to help connect specific details of Bundy’s numerous killings, Ted may never have been identified as a person of interest. Miss. Starnes believes profiling is a valid tool, as it “gives a basis to go off of for criminal investigators”. She cited the Mad Bomber as evidence of a time when offender profiling was useful in giving an accurate profile of the criminal in question, and that the case provided the “first portrait of a criminal”. Mr. Castle likewise agrees that profiling’s usefulness to criminal cases is not a myth: “Less cases would be solved if there were no criminal profilers, they are necessary and often involved in many high-profile criminal cases.” He believes profiling helped in the capture of the Green River Killer, although he could not cite anything specific in regards to the case. All three of these individuals believed that criminal profiling is helpful in solving cases, although none of them could provide any statistical data backing their claims. Most of their evidence was anecdotal as opposed to empirical; they all described
The Beltway sniper case is a relatively recent example of profilers unable to answer raised questions accurately during a case. Most criminal profilers in the case “agreed on one thing: the killer was probably a white male” (Davis & Morello, 2002: Kleinfield & Goode, 2002). Many others also speculated that the killer did not have children, he was not a soldier, and he was around twenty years in age (Gettleman, 2002; Kleinfield & Goode, 2002). However, all of these assumptions were incorrect when the real snipers were captured; two African-American men, one man was a 41-year-old soldier with four children at home, and the other man was seventeen (Muller, 2000). The inaccuracy of criminal profiling raises questions concerning its legitimacy as a useful tool in the effort to prevent crime. One study compares profilers against untrained individuals in their ability to determine a killer’s personality traits from crimes; the trained professionals hardly did any better than the amateurs at detection (Homant & Kennedy, 1998). In another study depicting a professional’s ability versus a novice, experienced homicide detectives “generated less accurate profiles of a murderer than did chemistry majors” (Kocsis, Hayes, & Irwin, 2002). This evidence does not prove that criminal profiling is not true, rather, it does not support the idea that criminal profiling is helpful in solving