Testing Profiling: How valid can it be really be?

With the two schools of thought currently at battle in criminal profiling (The FBI model vs. The Investigative Psychology model) each side has been showing an increased attempt at promoting their approach. The followers of the FBI model seem to be using a media approach to promotion. The practitioners of the FBI model are everywhere of late: TV, radio, movies, true-crime novels, the web. The investigative psychologists are taking a more academic approach promoting validity studies of their approach and attempting to show logically why their approach is more valid.

I am currently not locked into either school of thought. I see problems with both approaches. However, I will admit that scientifically if I had to chose I would be forced to pick the statistical based investigative approach.

As I was surfing the web the other day I came across an interesting website. I thought I would share the experience with you. Perhaps you'd find it both amusing and an eye opener. On APBNews.com I discovered a special section on the "Green River Killer." I did not really know anything about this case and I had very little interest in it. What I found interesting that famous former-FBI profiler John Douglas had a section on the site and it claimed you could help devise a profile. Well I thought this was an interesting act of sensationalization so I took a look. There was numerous sections on information on the green river case, including open forums for people to give and discuss clues and evidence.

I skipped over all the sections. I really wanted to see what the profiling thing was about. So without reading a word other then menu bar details I skipped to the profile section. Now two columns popped up. The left one had a series of pull down menus allowing you to create the profile (in a form format) of the killer. The right had a few paragraphs telling you what you have to do to profile (I ignored this I didn't read it till I was writing this) and said that your profile would be compared to that of Douglas's.

The column on the left had the following pull downs: Number of killers, Gender, Age, Race, Physical Build, Occupation, Vehicle, Home/Work Location, Hobbies, Arrest Record, Primary Motivation, Pre-Murder Behavior, Post-Murder Behavior. My selections were based on the following knowledge of the Green River Killer: there was a lot of victims over the years, it was in a big city (where? I have no idea where green river), the murder had not been caught. Other then that all my

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