the science of criminal profiling

[babybird67]

does anyone have any information on the current standing of criminal profiling, in relation to its scientific validity?

I'm currently reading Terence Hines Pseudoscience and the Paranormal and have come across this passage:

"There is surprisingly little actual research on the validity of criminal profiles. But, at least on the surface, it does seem to bear a striking similarity to cold reading. And the faith put in it by some in law enforcement bears a strong resemblance to the fallacy of personal validation - selectively remembering and reporting those parts of the profile that turned out to be correct while ignoring the aspects that were incorrect. In a rare article critical of profiling, Allison, Bennell, and Mokros (2002) have argued that profiling is based on a "naive and outdated understanding of personality" and is "unlikely to be a valid and reliable process."(p.115)"

Hines, p.66

Hines is comparing profiling to the cold readings done by alleged psychic mediums. Does this strike anyone as being particularly pertinent or are there scientific aspects to profiling of which i am not aware?

[kensei]

I think there is a science to profiling, though I'm not qualified to examine the particulars of it. I remember seeing a tv show about it once that impressed me (and I'm just saying this from memory). The case featured was that of New York state serial killer Arthur Shawcross. When he was captured, he matched the profile that had been done in every way except for one- he was significantly older than the profilers had predicted. But then they realized that he had spent some years in prison before committing his string of murders, thus his mental development had been stalled and his mind was as if he actually was the younger age that had been predicted.

[Dorian Gray]

]If you'd like an interesting, academic read try B.E. Harcourt's Against Prediction (2007). A brief summary: The modern criminal profile was developed in the USA as a statistical investigative technique to combat airline hijackers.(Ressler and the others claim they invented criminal profiling, but they merely adapted an established law enforcement practice). Given the limited resources and the nature of the crimes, the underlying rationale was to, “develop correlations between specific group based traits and group-based offending rates,” thereby identifying potential suspects for investigation. In this sense, criminal profiling, “relies on actual behaviour or on information about suspected activity by someone who meets the description of a specific individual.”

However, as Harcourt clearly demonstrates ( I will not go into his arguments concerning the differing elasticity and offending rates of targeted and non-targeted groups), criminal profiling suffers from what he terms the, 'ratchet effect.' For example: because the profiled group ( let's say bearded beer-drinkers) leads to a high hit-rate (successful stops and searches, for example), and because of limited resources, enforcement agencies use their new-found hit rate to allocate more time and resources to the previously targeted group(bearded beer-drinkers). In turn, this narrowing of focus is repeated until, ultimately, the targeted group become overrepresented not only in enforcement practices and policies, but in prison. This, in turn, skews the criminal justice system’s methods for determining sentencing, imprisonment, and release decisions. Moreover, this over-representation distorts not only the perception of the target group, but our notions of just legislative policy and punishment.

Considering profiling relies on the same actuarial assessments used by insurance companies, there is science (and a lot of statistics unfortunately) behind criminal profiling. That said, the science has inherent problems. When looking at something more specific, such as the criminal profiling of serial killers, a similar approach to bearded beer drinkers has been taken, and the actual hit rate by profilers is statistically insignificant. In fact, I think this can be backed-up by the simple example that most of us here can recite the standard FBI serial killer profile of, 'a (insert race here) serial killer working in area X.' Profiling is a massive subject, but I hope this helps answer your question to some degree.

Regards,

Dorian

(Sorry, I could not get the text to indent/tab, for some odd reason)

[Artemis]

Cold reading is nothing like a psychological profile. If anything, a psychological profile is more akin to a hot reading.

Cold reading relies on no facts, or, at the least very little factual input about the person receiving the reading. More than anything Cold reading is a technique employed by mentalists and charlatans (and by charlatan I refer to
psychics, mediums, fortune tellers or anyone that claims false abilities) that is used to give the illusion that the person has some form of super natural power.

Cold reading is basically the ability to analyze a person's behavior, speech and body language in order to get an idea about a person's life, personality, their past, and what they may currently be thinking.

I want to iterate, Cold Reading is an Illusion.

Cold reading would be me saying to you:

You find that you are highly creative and you are comfortable being alone yet you prefer the company of close friends and relatives, especially relatives close to you, usually family. You are close to your husband but you find yourself concerned about your children and providing for their care and well being, thus putting off things that you should be doing for yourself, like placing your career or education on hold for the time being but you do not regret the sacrifice. When mistakes are made, even through no fault of your own, you can be critical of yourself, more so than others, yet you learn from the experience.


I am sensing... the numbers 2 and 0. There was some event in your life that happened when you 2 or more than likely when you were 20. This event was major or my, in fact, still be continuing to play out in your life. You should follow your instinct in this regard.


That's a verrry basic cold reading.


A hot reading is another mentalism tool in which the person giving the reading knows who their client is ahead of time and starts snooping into their private life to give a more indepth reading.

A psychological profile, like a hot reading, relies on the facts that are surrounding the case, ie blood spatter evidence, location, witness statements and human psychology.

Cold reading is not to be confused with deductive, abductive and inductive reasoning which is seen in Sherlock Holmes.