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Racial Profiling In Criminal Investigations

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Racial Profiling In Criminal Investigations
• Offender profiling is only a part of criminal investigative analysis and is not treated as a single entity of investigation, instead as part of an interrelated behavioural investigation.
 However, this technique is not widely used in Australia, as there are only four members of the International Criminal Investigative Analysis Fellowship (ICIAF) that work in conjunction with the police, mostly within the serial cases of a violent/sexual nature, it is widely used in America possibly due to their higher rates of violent crime. (Davis, & Bennet, 2016)
Claim

• Offender profiles are not an efficient within police investigations due to their unspecific nature as well as a low success rate. Grounds
• These profiles are not suitable due …show more content…
Grounds 1
Offender profiles lead to biases within police work itself, and in many cases has created issues through streamlining an investigation to fewer lines of inquiry only to turn out false and/or inaccurate; usually through racial profiling and/or personal experiences clouding judgment. Evidence 1
• Racial profiling is an issue facing police investigation in recent years with public knowledge of these biases becoming more common. Criminal profiling in this case works as an enabler to this ethical issue. (Miller, 2009, pg. 23)
• Criminal profiles based on both personal and statistical information can lead to the specification and targeting of a particular minority by police subconsciously i.e. African American male. (Glaser, 2014, pg. 12) Evidence 2
• As offender profiles tend to work on a personal basis for each profiler the profilers own internalized biases become apparent within their investigation. (Rossmo, 2009, pg. 43)
• Illusory correlations between personal biases and evidence from crime scenes happen often in offender profiling and have a substantial effect on the investigation as a whole. (Snook, Cullen, Bennell, Taylor, & Gendreau, 2008, pg. …show more content…
d. GROUNDS 2
Criminal profiles have been known to be considerably inaccurate due to its basis in crime statistics that do not take into account the dark figure of crime; therefore, areas of crime with less research directed towards them i.e. Fraud (Australian Institute of Criminology, 2010, pg. 10), cannot be accurately profiled due to a lack of information. This coupled with the use of common sense and personal experience instead of empirical facts.

Evidence 1
• Criminal profiling is fundamentally created within a compilation of intuitions and common sense. There are a number of cases where the creation and use of a profile; combined with analytical and prosecutorial fervour, disrupted the investigation and on occasion lead to a grave breakdown of justice.
• While it is very challenging to find cases where profiling had an important influence to an investigation. (Devery, 2010, pg. 404) Evidence 2
• There has been very little research done to assess the precision of produced profiles within police
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