New Thoughts on Criminal Profiling
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. There is a reason why regular detectives are not considered experts of forensic science in court. It’s the same reason that a person with a bachelors degree in psychology is not a psychology export in court. When this stage is reached a strong foundation that makes an individual a competent expert is required. If we proceed with profiling as it seems to be moving in the states we are dooming the future of the discipline.
Criminal profiling should be preformed by psychology experts who have a strong foundation in criminal personality development and the behavioural reflections of that. It should be preformed by an individual who works not on clinical intuition alone but an objective framework that can stand up to academic and expert scrutiny.
Should detectives do profiling? In my opinion no. Should detectives who
Latest Articles