Foundational Concepts
Criminal Profiling
Also Known As Offender Profiling
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The investigative technique of inferring an unknown offenders likely characteristics, habits and background from the pattern of their crimes. The earliest surviving offender profile, produced by police surgeon Thomas Bond during the 1888 Jack the Ripper investigation, is its foundational document; Austrian jurist Hans Gross is separately recognized as a founding figure of the practice.
Facts
DomainSourced to the subject's own account Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Criminal profiling draws heavily on forensic psychology's account of offender behavior and cognition.
Thomas Bond's 1888 assessment is recognized as the earliest surviving offender profile.
Exemplified By Cases
Informed By
Pioneered By
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Jack the Ripper
Investigation, Criminal profiling sectionQuote, Investigation, Criminal profiling section
Bond's assessment was based on his own examination of the most extensively mutilated victim and the post mortem notes from the four previous canonical murders.
1. Wikipedia: Jack the Ripper
Investigation, Criminal profiling subsectionQuote, Investigation, Criminal profiling subsection
The opinion offered by Bond on the character of the Whitechapel murderer is the earliest surviving offender profile.
1. Wikipedia: Jack the Ripper
1. Wikipedia: Jack the Ripper
Wikipedia: Offender Profiling
Lead sectionQuote, Lead section
Offender profiling, also known as criminal profiling, is an investigative strategy used by law enforcement agencies to identify likely suspects.
Wikipedia: Offender Profiling
Research section: Pinizzotto and Finkel 1990Quote, Research section: Pinizzotto and Finkel 1990
showed that trained criminal profilers did not do any better than non-profilers in producing an accurate profile
Wikipedia: Offender Profiling
Research section: Snook et al. 2007-2008Quote, Research section: Snook et al. 2007-2008
have prompted some researchers to label the practice as pseudoscientific
Wikipedia: Offender Profiling
Wikipedia: Offender Profiling
Wikipedia: Hans Gross
Wikipedia: Forensic Psychology
Open Questions (1 open question)
Does offender profiling outperform non-specialist judgment?
Criminal profiling gained wide public visibility through cases such as the Jack the Ripper murders and the FBI Behavioral Science Unit's work, but controlled studies comparing trained profilers against detectives, psychologists and students with no profiling training have repeatedly failed to show that profilers predict offender characteristics more accurately than non-specialists.
What would resolve this Blind, controlled comparative studies, replicated across research groups, showing profilers achieve statistically significant accuracy above both chance and non-specialist baselines on real case data.
Forensic psychology and behavioral science methodologyWikipedia: Offender Profiling
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