Topic Summaries

Offender profiling

A-Level > Psychology > AQA > A-Level Psychology Topic Summaries > Forensic psychology > Offender profiling
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Addiction

  • The typology approach:
    • This uses a pre-established typology to place offender in two categories: organised or disorganised offenders.
    • Organised offenders: socially and sexually competent individuals who plan ahead of their crimes and are very unlikely to leave any evidence or clues at the crime scene. They have a ‘type’ of victim (e.g. Jeffery Dahmer targeted young men and boys). They carry out their crime in a precise and deliberate manner.
    • Disorganised offenders: socially and sexually incompetent individuals who commit spontaneous crimes. They are more likely to leave clues at the crime scene due to a lack of planning. Their attacks don’t seem to be premeditated with no specific target.
    • Offender profiling: using these categories, police can reduce a list of suspects and create a smaller field of investigation.
  • Data driven approach: doesn’t use pre-establish typology, instead drawing from the crime scene and eyewitness testimony. This approach includes investigative psychology and geographical profiling.
    • Investigative psychology: process where a crime is recorded onto a database. New evidence is then matched in the database in order to create a hypothesis about the likely motivations, social demographic, and likely characteristics of the offender. This emphasises the importance of time and place and the idea of interpersonal coherence, which is the theory that the way the offender treats the victim as a reflection of how they feel in their own life.
    • Geographical profiling: every offender has a base where they operate from. This can be identified through mapping previous crimes, usually forming a circle with the base at the centre, which can then be used to predict and prevent further crimes.

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