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Criminal Profiling: Applications

© Michael Decaire

Over the past two years I have talked about Criminal Behavioural Profiling on a number of occasions. Methodologies, validity, and applications of profiling have all been explored. I thought I would take some time during this months editorial to offer some thoughts on a application of Criminal Profiling that is not frequently used, but may prove beneficial to criminal investigations in a manner more significant than that of serial and multiple offence.

Criminal profiling has primarily been used as the analysis of multiple crime scenes in order to identify recurring patterns that appear to be the signs of an offenders personality and/or psycho-pathology. However, there is a clear potential benefit of using full time criminal profilers in the investigation of single offence murders and sexual crimes.

While the examination of clearly recurring offence patterns adds to the validity and reliability of the offender trait predictions, because statistically consistent behaviours across multiple crime scenes are more likely to be reflective of the offender not the context of the particular crime, some aspects of an individual crime may be so unusual or distinct that they could also be significant predictors.

For example, if a crime scene had a victim that displayed very evident facial trauma that left the body disfigured or unrecognizable it would be possible that the offender is showing traits of an attempted depersonalization (trying to make a well known victim seemingly unknown to lower guilt and stress). Multiple victims would not be needed to observe this trait (and quite likely would not be displayed in a multiple offenders behavioural repertoire or victimization profile), it would be somewhat clear that you need to look particularly at those who have close emotional relationships (either actual or perceived with the victim).

The usage of such clearly indicative behavioural markers could be applied to all homicide-forensic investigations, significantly narrowing the suspect base, and providing direction to new or especially difficult cases.

Currently this is not the trend in homicide investigation. The use of psychological factors in homicide investigation are rare, occurring primarily in serial offence, highly publicized cases, and with those departments who are lucky enough to have a trained psychologist or profiler on staff.

Why is this the case? Well there are probably several factors involved in the non-proliferation of on staff profilers in homicide units across North America. The first is funding, psychologists are expensive. Most governmental institutions are experiencing a constant trend of cut-backs and the contract of a full time psychologist is financially unpractical. However, the usage of a masters level trained profiler, or a departmentally shared contract with an external behavioural science team could be a cost affective alternative.