Usefulness of criminal profiling

Criminal profiling is an effective investigating mechanism to recognize probable suspect when crime occurs. Criminal profiling is usually used by law enforcement agencies when crook’s identity is unidentified and with serious criminal felonies such as murder, sexual stabbing.

We normally watch movies, TV shows that glorifies the role of profilers in tracking down serial killers, child abusers, and kidnappers. But these sources do not highlights accurate pictures how criminal profiling work. In true sense, profiling is a dominant approach to resolve a crime by rigorous analysis of crime scene.

Major goals of criminal profiling are to give basic information to the police with the features of the criminal such as age, race, personality, employment and marital status, to suggest any possessions the offender may have that would associate him with the crime scene and to advice interviewing tactics and suggestions the police may use when interrogating a suspect.

There are four main approaches to criminal profiling. These include:

       The geographical approach: This approach looks at patterns in the location and timing of crimes to make decisions about links between crimes and suggestions about where criminals live and work.

       Investigative psychology: Investigative officers use this after completing geographical profiling. Officers establish psychological theories and procedures of analysis to predict lawbreaker characteristics from offending behaviour.

       The typological approach: This involves looking at the features of crime scenes to allocate criminals to different groupings.

       The clinical approach: This approach uses understandings from psychiatry and clinical psychology to support investigation where a criminal is thought to be suffering from a mental illness of other psychological deformity.

The process of criminal profiling can be categorized into five stages:

Profiling inputs: Collecting all the information about the crime.

Decision processing: Information gathered in the initial stage is being organized in order to categorise the crime by type and style.

Crime assessment: After briefing all the information gathered in previous steps, the crime assessment is made.

The offender profile: This focuses on theorizing about the type of a person who committed crime

Investigative use: Criminal profilers prepare a report for investigators so that they will focus on finding criminal, that matches characteristics in the profile and it can be used for planning an interview process of suspects.

It can be said that by detailed study of the features of a crime and how a crime has been committed, a criminal profiler is in position to identify the culprit. To comprehend the evidence, a profiler uses reasoning approach.  That includes inductive and deductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning uses statistics and relies on comparing a crime to past. Deductive reasoning is based on the evidence.

In condensing the facts, criminal profiling is highly supportive procedure to detect and capture criminals. It describes the behaviour of criminal before they involve in high level criminal act. In fact, it is effectual procedure for crime scene analysis. Criminal profiling is a blend of sociological, psychiatric, psychological, and criminological disciplines.