Profiling: What is it?
What is the definition of Profiling?
the process of drawing inferences about a criminal’s personality, behavior, motivation, and demographic characteristics based on crime scenes and other evidence
What is geographic profiling?
sometimes referred to as criminal spatial mapping and geoprofiling
⁃ relies on maps and math
what is Encoding?
gathering information and putting it in a form that can be held in memory
What is the cross-race effect?
A phenomenon affecting eyewitness identification in which people have more difficulty recognizing the faces of people outside their racial or ethnic group than the faces of those within their group
What skills do you need to do profiling?
analyze the crime scenes, gather information about the victims, and study both police and autopsy reports
What is a psychological autopsy?
What are misconceptions about psychopaths?
The process of estimating the general vicinity of a criminal’s home or place of work or projecting the location of the next crime, based on the pattern of past crimes and the geographic features of particular places
All psychopaths are violent
All psychopaths are psychotic
Psychopathology’s is untreatable
What is storage?
holding the encoded information in the brain over time
What is an unbiased lineup and why do we need one?
An unbiased lineup is when there is not more than 2 out of 12 mock witnesses that can pick out the suspect
identification of the suspect in the lineup by an eyewitness may not be based on true recognition but merely on the similarity to the verbal description
what does profiling reveal about the perpetrator?
the signature aspect of the crime — the distinctive, personal feature of the crime reflects the killers personality
Jack the Ripper
was never caught so his profile can never be assessed
What is retrieval?
accessing and pulling out the stored information at a later time
How do we improve eyewitness testimony and what do we have to expose errors in court?
encompass the planning and construction of a lineup (including who will administer the lineup), instructions given to witnesses prior to viewing lineups, video recording of the entire procedure, obtaining of information about eyewitness confidence, and the avoidance of repeated identifications and showups
voir dire; questioning potential jurors during selection to expose biased ones
cross-examination: the formal interrogation of a witness called by the other party in a court of law to challenge or extend testimony already given.
Jury Deliberation; places fact-finding in the hands of a group of citizens
How is profiling used in investigations?
Profiles provide leads for police to help focus efforts of investigators, can also be used to set a trap for the criminal, it instructs investigators to look for a particular type of person and to ignore other types of people
The Olympic Bomber
the profile of the bomber caused them to arrest the wrong person for the crime
⁃ the actual bomber was not arrested until 2005
What impacts memory after a crime?
cognitive dissonance which predicts that once you commit yourself to a particular action you will become motivated to justify that course of action
What is the cognitive interview?
Cognitive interview is a step by step procedure designed to relax the witness and to mentally reinstate the context surrounding the crime. The goal is to improve the witness’s retrieval of accurate information while avoiding the increases suggestibility of hypnosis. Requires police to adopt a style of interviewing they are not used to. Research shows that it does improve recall of accurate information without an increase in witness suggest-ability
What are profilings limitations?
What are the three myths about psychopaths?
it remains an unvalidated technique. How profilers move from raw data about a crime to a useful profile is not systematic or clearly articulated
it relies on the instincts of the profiler which is not a good thing to rely on
crime scene characteristics do not support the classification of serial killers into categories, crime scene characteristics do not associate with particular liminal personality types, the abilities of profiles in vague terms should not be mistaken for clear explanations
All psychopaths are violent
All psychopaths are psychotic
Psychopathology is untreatable
The Mad Bomber
the profile for this case turned out to be spot on and led police to the right person
⁃ this profile also contained lots of nonsense about the bomber that was not true
Can we 100% rely on memory?
No. People have false memories and can add details to a memory that weren't there.
What is Forensic Hypnosis?
Hypnosis is induced through the power of suggestion. Memories brought out through hypnosis may be full of fantasy and imaginative elaboration. Research shows that this does not increase the accuracy of information and a witness who vividly remembers an event during hypnosis may become confident that the imagined even is an accurate memory