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. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
DomainSourced to the subject's own account Connections
Associated With
D. Kim Rossmo developed geographic profiling (criminal geographic targeting), a distinct offender-profiling methodology using an offender's crime locations to predict their likely home base.
Criminal profiling draws heavily on forensic psychology's account of offender behavior and cognition.
Source Wikipedia: Forensic Psychology
Thomas Bond's 1888 assessment is recognized as the earliest surviving offender profile.
Source Wikipedia: Jack the Ripper
Park Dietz is a prominent forensic psychiatrist consulted on criminal profiling and behavioral assessment in numerous high-profile American cases, including the Hinckley and Dahmer proceedings.
Exemplified By Cases
Source Wikipedia: Jack the Ripper
Informed By
Source Wikipedia: Hans Gross
Open Questions
Source Offender Profiling (Wikipedia)
Pioneered By
Ann Wolbert Burgess co-authored Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives with FBI agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler, foundational research underlying the FBI's criminal profiling program, and coined "rape trauma syndrome."
David Canter founded investigative psychology and pioneered academically rigorous geographic and psychological offender profiling in Britain, notably in the 1980s "Railway Rapist" (John Duffy) case.
Source Offender Profiling (Wikipedia)
Source Offender Profiling (Wikipedia)
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Jack the Ripper
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.
Investigation, Criminal profiling subsection
The opinion offered by Bond on the character of the Whitechapel murderer is the earliest surviving offender profile.
- Associated With: Jack the Ripper Murders
- Exemplified By Cases: Jack the Ripper Murders
View the SourceOffender Profiling (Wikipedia)
Lead section
Offender profiling, also known as criminal profiling, is an investigative strategy used by law enforcement agencies to identify likely suspects.
Research section: Pinizzotto and Finkel 1990
showed that trained criminal profilers did not do any better than non-profilers in producing an accurate profile
Research section: Snook et al. 2007-2008
have prompted some researchers to label the practice as pseudoscientific
- Pioneered By: John E. Douglas
- Pioneered By: Robert Ressler
View the SourceWikipedia: 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 methodologyOffender Profiling (Wikipedia)
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