Criminal Profiling
What Is Criminal Profiling?
Criminal profiling is a psychological and forensic method used to understand a criminal event by identifying a set of individual characteristics and personality traits of the perpetrator, as revealed through the circumstances and evidence of the crime. The subject is described in terms of their stable psychological state.
Goals of Criminal Profiling
- Formulating hypotheses about the personality traits and mental state of the perpetrator to identify and narrow down the circle of suspects.
- Determining the motive for the crime.
- Identifying the mechanism of the crime, including psychopathological (psychiatric, sexological) aspects.
- Deciding whether to combine criminal cases (in serial crimes) based on common features in different elements of the crimes.
- Developing recommendations for investigative tactics based on priority theories and the most promising directions for the search.
- Assessing the likelihood of the perpetrator committing similar crimes in the future.
- Determining similarities and differences between the compiled profile and a suspect.
- Providing recommendations to investigators for conducting interrogations.
Types of Criminal Profiling
- Descriptive: Analytically argues the characteristics of the perpetrator based on the circumstances and evidence of the crime.
- Qualitative: Aims to characterize the type of motivation or personality of the perpetrator (e.g., organized vs. disorganized according to FBI typology; sexual and non-sexual, serial and non-serial; strangler-ripper according to Antonyan, etc.).
- Investigative: Summarizes and optimizes information about the perpetrator’s traits for search purposes (e.g., should Chikatilo be sought among homosexuals?).
- Identification: Contains key psychological traits of the perpetrator suitable for identification among a group of suspects.
- Probabilistic: Forecasts the likelihood of the same person (not yet caught) committing another offense, indicating the time, place, and victim characteristics (“decoy victims”).
Computer Programs for Criminal Profiling
- VICAP (USA): Based on extensive databases accumulated over years, allowing the establishment of statistical links between the features of a criminal event and the characteristics of the perpetrator.
- CATCHEM (UK), VIGLAS (Canada): By comparing the characteristics of a crime committed by an unknown perpetrator with those in the database, these programs help identify the perpetrator by finding similar patterns of criminal behavior that may belong to the same person.
Stages of Criminal Profiling
1. Creating a Forensic Information Model of the Crime
- Collecting information carriers about the perpetrator and the crime event (crime scene examination, forensic reports on the victim or evidence, the victim’s personality, witness statements, etc.).
- Summarizing information in four blocks:
- Method of the crime, tools and means used (how and with what the victim was killed)
- The crime’s object as a carrier of certain victimological qualities
- Material circumstances of the crime (spatial and temporal characteristics)
- Persons indirectly connected to the crime
- Reconstructing the criminal act based on this information
2. Situational Modeling
The main task is to identify which aspects of the behavior are determined by “personality.” This is done using the following parameters:
- Degree of correspondence of the action to the actions of other people (individual differences): The less a person’s action matches the actions of others, the more it is determined by personal factors.
- Degree of correspondence of the action to the same person’s actions in other situations (stability across situations): The more consistently a person acts in different situations, the more their behavior is determined by personal factors.
- Degree of correspondence of the action to the same person’s actions in similar situations in the past (stability over time): The more a person changes their behavior in similar situations, the more it is determined by personal factors.
3. Interpretation of Behavior
- Reconstructing the mechanism and motivation of the behavior.
- Reconstructing the individual psychological profile and mental states.
4. Documenting the Profile
- Analytical section or justification.
- The actual criminal profile-depends on the specific task of law enforcement agencies.