Offender Profiling

[tolman]

That is not how it is portrayed. It is passed off as highly accurate and the misses are not mentioned.

How it's portrayed generally (in fiction and "How I solved case X" stories) may not be too important. After all, lots of psychics claim to have been useful to the police, but how many police forces actually use them?

Presumably, there are only a small number of cases where it might be useful (where there are a lot of potential suspects, some focussing of follow up can save time, and follow-up could lead to evidence to rule people in or out).

Even if (especially if?) it worked well on such cases, it might well end up being overapplied, especially if it attracted people with excessive faith in it.

[ZERO]

How it's portrayed generally (in fiction and "How I solved case X" stories) may not be too important. After all, lots of psychics claim to have been useful to the police, but how many police forces actually use them?

I think it is important insofar as it's misleading.
Just like psychics.

Presumably, there are only a small number of cases where it might be useful (where there are a lot of potential suspects, some focussing of follow up can save time, and follow-up could lead to evidence to rule people in or out).

Small number indeed.

-the British Home Office analyzed a hundred and eighty-four crimes, to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That’s just 2.7 per cent,-

I wonder how much time was wasted on the 97.3% chasing wrong information?

Even if (especially if?) it worked well on such cases, it might well end up being overapplied, especially if it attracted people with excessive faith in it.

With a success rate as low as the above quote, over application may not be a worry in the UK.

[tolman]

I think it is important insofar as it's misleading.
Just like psychics.

But misleading to *who*?
At least with psychics, they try and drum up personal publicity for their regular business by claiming to help the police solve crimes. Hardly any civilians have any potential need for a profiler, so it's not quite the same there.

A good analysis of a suggested technique wouldn't just look at number of applications vs. number of successes. It'd start out by trying to establish if any of those cases were ones where it was (or should have been) thought there was little potential of it succeeding.
How many cases were basically unsuitable, how many were cases where nothing else had worked (and nothing seemed likely to work), how many cases ended up unsolved, etc.

I doubt many people would turn to profiling if they actually thought they had some decent suspects, which could certainly lead to it being a last-ditch technique on a fair number of hopeless cases.

I wonder how much time was wasted on the 97.3% chasing wrong information?

It would certainly be interesting to see an analysis of the failures - how many times a profilie was just stating the obvious, and how many times it not only didn't help (due to vagueness, or the investigation succeeding on some other track, or people just ignoring it, or the profiler saying "I can't really do much with the information you have"), but how many times it actually sent people off on wild goose chases, or directed police away from the guilty.

It'd also be interesting to know how it's supposed to have helped in the cases where it was claimed to have helped. What things did it say that people wouldn't have thought of themselves, and were they down to deep psychological insights, or just analysis of similar past cases?

[Matt]

PZ Weighs in on the same article
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2...=Google+Reader

[Admin]

I've attached a copy (registered members can download) of a real life offender profile issued by the Baton Rouge police in Louisiana.

It is indeed not too dissimilar to psychic style information given out by 'psychic detectives'.

It also contains a lot of vague and varied information and so is ideal for retrofitting.

[Drop Bear]

Fora bit of an insight into the mentality of profiling,I recommend 'Stigma' by Erving Goffman and a look at labelling theory generally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erving_Goffman


Offender profiling remains controversial:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offende...#Controversies