13.1: Criminal Profiling Defined
- Page ID
- 81990
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Criminal profiling is synonymous with offender profiling both of which are useful investigative tools used in policing (Woodhams and Toye, 2007). Profiling’s purpose is to identify likely suspects that are correlated with criminal characteristics and patterns. Berg (200) maintains that a Psychological profiler relies heavily upon perpetrators methods of operation or evidence left at a crime scene to identify a person’s personality or state of mind. The process is not new and dates back to the Jack the Ripper murder campaign in 1888 and has evolved to applications including but not limited to predictive profiling, sexual assault offender profiling, and behaviors recognizable and related to criminal conduct (Canter, 2004).