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.
OpenForensic psychology and behavioral science methodologyOffender Profiling (Wikipedia)