Did Jack the Ripper live in London City jurisdiction?

[Fiver]

I believe this killer was more organized than not.

I believe the organized-disorganized view of analyzing criminal behavior is simplistic and, at best, unhelpful. The very creation of the mixed category is an acknowledgement of the limitations of this approach. Far too often, broad assumptions are made based on limited data. Criminal profiling has never successfully identified a criminal.

If the entire idea isn't a waste of time, we need to compare individual elements of the crimes to the behaviors of known offenders and see if there is any correlation.

[Patrick Differ]

Hi Fiver- I believe sometimes you can make an argument too complex and I do not believe anything is unhelpful in honest debates, especially with this topic. There is plenty of data and profiling is a useful tool. Looked at another way, how could it possibly hurt? It's my personal belief that there was organized thinking and these murders met specific criteria he needed to limit his risk. Just my opinion.

[Fiver]

Hi Fiver- I believe sometimes you can make an argument too complex and I do not believe anything is unhelpful in honest debates, especially with this topic. There is plenty of data and profiling is a useful tool. Looked at another way, how could it possibly hurt? It's my personal belief that there was organized thinking and these murders met specific criteria he needed to limit his risk. Just my opinion.

How is criminal profiling a useful tool? It has been around since 1888 and has failed to identify even a single perpetrator. Either the entire approach is a waste of time or the existing models are inadequate.

"The dichotomous classification of serial killers into either Organized or Disorganized is widely cited and utilized. Yet only one, small-scale, empirical test of such a model can be found in the scientific literature and that study is open to a number of serious challenges. Despite many obvious weaknesses in the clarity and reliability of this typology it is commonly cited as a basis for the production of ‘offender profiles’ to help police investigations and has, on occasion, formed the foundation of some prosecution arguments in murder trials." - Canter, David V., Alison, Laurence J., Alison, Emily and Wentink, Natalia (2004) The Organized/Disorganized Typology of Serial Murder: Myth or Model? Psychology, Public Policy, and Law

Bringing a weapon to the crime scene is organized behavior based on the Organized/Disorganized model. The body displayed in open view is disorganized behavior based on the same model. The model fails when examining the Ripper.

[Patrick Differ]

Fiver you are entitled to your opinion. As I said profiling methods cannot hurt as detectives need every tool in their arsenal and are always advancing use of tools as they develop. I do not have access to or time to say definitively profiling is unhelpful. There are too many crimes. I've heard from friends in the FBI that DNA and Artifical Intelligence are now on the forefront in terms of tools. Douglas did his first pass at JtR in 1988. Back then it was a Systems Analysis approach so a worthy attempt for the time. Still that was 37 years ago. Before Window, the Internet or digitalization of data. In today's World there could be many more categories and methods to measure and hundreds of outcomes.
My attempt in this post was just a general attempt to see what others thought about the demarcation advantage of living in London City v Metro, and especially the relationship between the Police forces.
It appears that City Detectives were dispatched to interview tenants in the Wentworth Street Building. Out of jurisdiction.
Yet it was Charles Warren himself that took over the Goulston Street scene and erased the Graffiti to the objection of the City police. A mistake perhaps but it showed the turf position.

Did the Ripper take advantage of this knowledge? Up until Metro all the killings were in Metro. And the following killing was again in Metro. What do people think this means? If anything?

[JeffHamm]

How is criminal profiling a useful tool? It has been around since 1888 and has failed to identify even a single perpetrator. Either the entire approach is a waste of time or the existing models are inadequate.

"The dichotomous classification of serial killers into either Organized or Disorganized is widely cited and utilized. Yet only one, small-scale, empirical test of such a model can be found in the scientific literature and that study is open to a number of serious challenges. Despite many obvious weaknesses in the clarity and reliability of this typology it is commonly cited as a basis for the production of ‘offender profiles’ to help police investigations and has, on occasion, formed the foundation of some prosecution arguments in murder trials." - Canter, David V., Alison, Laurence J., Alison, Emily and Wentink, Natalia (2004) The Organized/Disorganized Typology of Serial Murder: Myth or Model? Psychology, Public Policy, and Law

Bringing a weapon to the crime scene is organized behavior based on the Organized/Disorganized model. The body displayed in open view is disorganized behavior based on the same model. The model fails when examining the Ripper.

Hi Fiver,

I want to separate this post into two phases, the first is with regards to what criminal profiling is "supposed to do", without getting into whether or not it is able to actually do that, and then in the latter section, address that issue.

With regards to : "How is criminal profiling a useful tool? It has been around since 1888 and has failed to identify even a single perpetrator.", that's a bit unfair. It would be like saying "How is organising people with regards to their relationship with a victim a useful tool? It's been done forever and has failed to identify a single perpetrator." You might say that such organisation of people has identified lots of offenders, but no, it wasn't the act of listing people that identified the offender, but rather, by organising people in terms of social connections to a victim the investigation can search for evidence where it is more likely to be found. It wasn't the "list" itself that identified the spouse as the offender, but rather such listing results in a more efficient search.

Criminal profiling doesn't claim to "identify the offender", so it is hardly a fair criticism to say it hasn't done something it isn't supposed to do in the first place. The goal of criminal profiling is much like listing people with regards to their "social distance" from the victim (spouse, family, friends, co-workers, etc) in that it helps to create an efficient search space. The purpose of a criminal profile is to suggest the "type of person" who is more likely to have committed the offence than some other "type" - basically, what sort of characteristics is the offender more likely to have and what sort of characteristics are they less likely to have, so that during the investigation should they come across someone like that they might warrant a closer look. It's sort of like listing people in terms of social distance, but now the distance is in terms of "fit to the profile", but just because someone might be "a good fit", that doesn't make them the offender anymore than being a victim's spouse makes them the offender. It still requires investigation to find actual evidence one way or the other.

If criminal profiles provide useful information, then over a large set of separate crimes (or separate series of crimes) offenders will be found sooner if the investigation spends time prioritising people in line with the profile compared to investigating people randomly (meaning, without regard for the profile's suggestions).

In short, the utility of profiling is about aiding an investigation with the aim of making the investigation more efficient, not about identifying the individual per se.

Now, does it actually do that?

(this gets to your question of : "Either the entire approach is a waste of time or the existing models are inadequate."

The Canter et al (2004) paper you mention is a very good one, and it nicely demonstrates how the "organised/disorganised" classification is, for lack of a better term, rubbish. And in that regards I think they have nicely demonstrated that the organised/disorganised model is definitely inadequate and not suited to purpose.

The whole area of "criminal personality profiling" is a mess. The data sets are limited (as they point out, the whole organised/disorganised idea is based upon only 36 cases, which is woefully inadequate), and the information from a crime is very hard to quantify (at what point does emptying a purse and searching through the contents become "belongings scattered"? At what number of stab wounds do we have "overkill"? Would the wound to MacKenzie's abdomen count as "mutilation"? etc) and the aspects one is trying to "profile" about an offender are often equally difficult to quantify.

However, despite the vagueness of the information, and having to resort to rather crude classification type measures (overkill - Yes/No, etc) that will be subjective to some degree, what the Canter article does show is that there does appear to be some sort of underlying "structure" with regards to the crimes - certain things tend to co-occur allowing one to place an offence in what looks to be one of 4 categories, or perhaps to place an offence along two dimensions rather than just the one of the "organised/disorganised" idea.

I don't think Canter et al (2004) go on to examine if there is any predictive value of classifying the crime scenes this way. Meaning, if you have a crime scene classified as "Mutilation", are the offenders who committed those offenses somehow different from offenders in the other 3 categories? (doesn't have to be a clean division to be useful, might just be "these offenders tend to be psychotic 3:1 while in the other categories it is more 1:5 (I'm making those ratios up), which means the offender is much more likely to be psychotic than not, but it isn't evidence they must be).

Anyway, I've not done any real research in the area of personality profiling, apart from read the occasional article. While I'm not impressed with the FBI's "model", it is almost never the case that the first attempt to systematize things hits upon the best solution. I do think it is worth pursuing as a research question though, and that there could potentially emerge some useful bits of information. But I also think that until something has been very thoroughly investigated, and then validated, it should not be used in applied situations. Investigations are hard enough as it is, and adding "noise" by the way of a non-substantiated profile doesn't help and can be a distraction.

There might be some work done already that is trying to do this sort of thing. It's been awhile since I've done a literature search to see if there's anything new. But unless that's the case, my own view is that as currently implemented, the personality profiles are not worth much.

Even the spatial analysis stuff, which looks to me to be more useful, has to be viewed with caution and I go to great lengths to point out what it can and cannot do, and what sort of things one has to consider, and so forth. Every test I've been able to do, however, has shown that the routines do narrow down the search area in a useful and informative way. But in no way does the analysis "solve" a case, that is not the purpose, it's purpose is to provide useful information to aid an investigation that helps them search more efficiently - just like listing people in terms of their social distances aids an investigation but does not in and of itself solve a case. Profiling should not make claims of being able to do, or be evaluated as if they are expected to do, anything more than that.

- Jeff