Offender Profiling And Criminal Differentiation

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Canter, David V. Offender profiling and criminal differentiation Original Citation Canter, David V. (2000) Offender profiling and criminal differentiation. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 5 (1). pp. 23-46. ISSN 1355-3259 This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/8637/ The University Repository is a digital collection of the research outputof the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. Users may access full items free of charge; copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational ornot-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided: • • • The authors, title and full bibliographic details is credited in any copy; A hyperlink and/or URL is included for the original metadata page; and The content is not changed in any way.

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Accepted for Publication in Journal of Criminal and Legal Psychology February 2000

Offender Profiling And Criminal Differentiation

David Canter
Centre for Investigative Psychology, Department of Psychology, Eleanor Rathbone Building, University of Liverpool, Liverpool LL69 7ZA, UK Purpose. The psychological hypotheses that form the foundations for ‘Offender Profiling’ areidentified and the research that has tested them is reviewed. Argument. ‘Offender profiling’ is taken to be the derivation of inferences about a criminal from aspects of the crime(s) s/he has committed. For this process to move beyond deduction based on personal opinion and anecdote to an empirically based science a number of aspects of criminal activity need to be distinguished and examined. The notionof a hierarchy of criminal differentiation is introduced to highlight the need to search for consistencies and variations at many levels of that hierarchy. However, current research indicates that the key distinctions are those that differentiate, within classes of crime, between offences and between offenders,. This also leads to the hypothesis of a circular ordering of criminal actions, analogousto the colour circle, a ‘radex’. The radex model, tested using Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) procedures, allows specific hypotheses to be developed about important constituents of criminal differentiation: Salience; MDS analyses reveal the importance of the frequency of criminal actions as the basis on which the significance of those actions can be established. Models of Differentiation; theresearch reviewed mainly supports distinctions between criminals in terms of the forms of their transactions with their explicit or implicit victims, Consistency; offenders have been shown to exhibit similar patterns of action on different occasions. The most reliable examples of this currently are in studies of the spatial behaviour of criminals. Inference; under limited conditions it is possibleto show associations between the characteristics of offenders and the thematic focus of their crimes. In general these results provide support for models of thematic consistency that link the dominant themes in an offender’s crimes to characteristic aspects of his/her lifestyle and offending history. Implications. Much of what passes for ‘offender profiling’ in practice and as reported in thefactual and fictional media has no basis in empirical research. However, there are some promising results emerging in some areas of study. These results are most likely to be of value to police investigations when incorporated into decision support systems and the training of police officers. The results do also provide new insights into the psychology of crime.

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David Canter

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