Why does criminal profiling work

The research literature is genuinely strange. A meta analysis by criminologists Brent Snook, Joseph Eastwood, Paul Gendreau, Claire Goggin, and Richard Cullen compared four studies where self-described criminal profilers were tasked with analyzing crime scene data and coming up with a profile, and compared their predictions to other groups like normal detectives or students.

They find that profilers do only slightly better than random people at predicting traits of offenders. A group of researchers at the University of Liverpool with the psychologist Laurence Alison have taken a different approach by evaluating the central assumption of profiling: that characteristics of a crime and crime scene can predict useful traits about a criminal. They looked at British rapists: all men, all targeting women 16 and older, and all rapists who attacked strangers rather than acquaintances or significant others.

Were people who committed crimes similarly, with similar modi operandi, likely to be similar demographically, too? Nope, not at all. In other words, the central assumption of criminal profiling is nonsense.

But criminal profiling also has an opportunity cost: There are a lot of really hard problems in the world that progress in psychology would help address, and from which criminal profiling might be a distraction.

Mental health struggles are an obvious example, but there are less obvious ones too, like getting better at predictions. Philip Tetlock at the University of Pennsylvania has been, for decades, studying how experts and laypeople make predictions about future events, and holding tournaments to isolate the factors that lead to good, accurate forecasts. The social consequences of being able to forecast the future better are immense.

This is even clearer if you look to the past. This failing became apparent when an unknown serial killer was terrorizing the Washington, D. Criminal profilers were full of ideas about what kind of person police should look for. They announced that the murderer was probably an employed but disgruntled white man in his 20s or 30s, likely in a white van.

But when police finally arrested the two so-called Beltway Snipers in October , they found that the murderers were unemployed black men, ages 17 and 40, in a blue sedan. One method researchers have tried, however, is to show case files from solved crimes to profilers and others and compare the accuracy of the profiles they generate. The results have been mixed ; profilers were more accurate on a rape case file, but did no better than average on a murder file.

The profile group had the greatest variability of any of the other groups, which included psychics and psychologists. He easily rattled off a list of cases where FBI profilers came up short.

Their description of the Unabomber turned out to be a mixture of accurate he was a loner living in a rural area and inaccurate he was older and more educated than predicted. Profilers investigating a blast on the U. Iowa said it was a murder-suicide due to unrequited homosexual love, but investigators later concluded that it was caused by either human error or equipment failure. Research has shown this to be an outmoded concept of little predictive usefulness Canter et al. It is widely acknowledged that offender traits are not reliably predictive of the crimes they commit, and given that murder may often primarily be an ill-thought-through response to a highly-charged emotional situation, it is intuitive that the usefulness of trait-based approaches will be limited.

That demographic features could be predicted from an assessment of particular configurations of specific behaviours occurring in short-term, highly traumatic situations seems an ambitious and unlikely possibility. Until the process is more formally verified, the evidential usefulness of profiles should be treated cautiously, or even entirely excluded from consideration in court.

Snook et al. In addition, despite the methodological and theoretical arguments, a further complication in the review of CP arises with the argument of who can best apply such techniques in the field. In terms of the value of evidence provided by CP, the field will struggle to prove its relevance.

Not many profilers would assert that CP can identify a single actual perpetrator, preferring to state that its role is to indicate the type of person responsible, being the person most likely to commit a crime with such specific and unique characteristics. This inability to deliver an identifying profile is the hurdle most guaranteed to cause CP to stumble. In conclusion, much of the literature in the area is contradictory, which in its own way is a positive and healthy way for the discipline and the methods used in evaluating it to develop and evolve.

Some reviews of CP have used systematic approaches, and others are more narrative and theoretical approaches, but they often arrive at the same conclusions: despite limitations in the research corpus, CP shows it has the promise to evolve into something more robust and useful. However, in the absence of that evolutionary step just yet, it must be said that there is very little evidence of the compelling kind that would actually support CP in enjoying the large level of public and police acceptance that it currently enjoys.

Find resumes. Help Center. Find Jobs. Post a Job. Home Hiring resources What is a Criminal Profiler? Key Job Duties and Skills. What is a Criminal Profiler? Post a Job Are you a job seeker? Find jobs. What is a criminal profiler? Key duties, roles and responsibilities of a criminal profiler In order to develop psychological profiles of a suspect based on evidence, profilers must have extensive investigatory knowledge and the ability to review and analyze evidence.

The FBI academy involves training in several areas, including: Physical fitness Intelligence and evidence collection Interrogation and negotiation tactics Firearm training Defensive driving Related: Behavioral Interview Questions to Ask Candidates Job outlook for criminal profilers Criminal profilers work in a competitive and specialized field within law enforcement.