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New Thoughts on Criminal Profiling

© Michael Decaire

Criminal profiling has always been one of the most popular editorial topics within the Forensic Psychology section at Suite101. I would estimate that 90 percent of all email correspondence I receive is in regards to profiling related queries. As a result I have attempted to review the area as intensively as I possibly can.

Lately I have not written much about the topic for I felt I was reiterating myself and in all honesty had nothing new to say about the topic.

I realized that the media is still hot on the topic of profiling. A number of fictional profiling tv series, movies, and books still exist. Additionaly, profiling has remained a stable of press interviews into kidnappings and violent crimes, forensic science reality shows, and non-fiction true crime stories.

In my perception nothing had really changed within the field however. The two profiling methodology types are still bantering about which method is better, while neither of them has pushed for a strong independent investigation of which approach is better.

Methodologies aside I recently stumbled across a program on TV regarding the ethnicity of police officers receiving a course in criminal profiling and expected to add this to their homicide or sexual crime investigation repertoire.

The idea of this very much disturbed me on both an individual and psychology professional. I wondered about the level of truth behind this news piece and did a bit of investigating on my own.

While perusing through several dozen law and security programs (generally considered the pre-med equivalent of police college) I learned that the majority of these programs have profiling training.

Consider that the individuals in these programs have no psychological training at all outside of the few hours of social science training in high school. Is this important? Well, one must realize that irregardless of what approach to profiling you follow it is a psychological process (and in some cases an advanced statistical one).

A good analogy would be training an individual in the process of DNA testing without giving them a very extensive and competent background in biochemistry.

The acceptance of profiling by many police departments across North America is an excellent advancement of the field. However, it is at times of advancement that a profession must be very cautious where it treads. A mistake at this point of time would lead to a foundation built upon an error and would surely fail down the road.

The ultimate goal of profiling (beyond the assistance in apprehension of an offender) is to create a method that is objective and statistically provable. Once this occurs, and the predictions of a profiling approach can be one of probability, profiling can move beyond the front end operations of police work and go into other domains like the court room.