What is creative response

HOMICIDE STUDIES / August 2000Muller /CRIMINAL PROFILINGCriminal ProfilingReal Science or Just Wishful Thinking?DAMON A. MULLERUniversity of MelbourneCriminal profiling is designed to generate information on a perpetrator of a crime, usu-ally a serial offender, through an analysis of the crime scene left by the perpetrator. Thetwo main approaches to criminal profiling, crime scene analysis and investigative psy-chology, are examined for the presence of a paradigm and the possibility of falsifiability todetermine whether they can be considered as science.The subject of criminal profilinghas caught the public’s imaginationin recent times, with references to it appearing in all forms of media.The most well-known example of criminal profiling in the popu-lar media is in the filmSilence of the Lambs, based on the ThomasHarris novel of the same name. Several television shows have alsorecently been based around the premise of criminal profiling,includingMillennium,Profiler, and evenThe X-Files. It is interest-ing to note that all of these popular portrayals of profiling are some-what inaccurate because they suggest that profiling is a magicalskill somewhat analogous to a precognitive psychic ability.Those who practice criminal profiling have claimed that it isalternatively a science or an art, depending on who you listen to.Even those who confess that it is more an art than a science (e.g.,Ressler & Shachtman, 1992) still point to supposedly scientificstud-ies to support their claims that it is in fact worth using. Yet one ofthe biggest hurdles standing in the way of acceptance of criminalprofiling is that there is very little authoritative material on it, andalmost nothing in the way of scientific studies to support the claimsof the profilers.Many of the law enforcement agencies around the world arestill quite skeptical of the work of criminal profilers. Holmes andHolmes (1996) observe that an offender profile is usually only234HOMICIDE STUDIES, Vol. 4 No. 3, August 2000 234-264© 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.
called in when the police have exhausted all other leads, some-times including psychics and astrologers. Techniques such asforensic DNA analysis have become essential to modern criminalinvestigation, possibly because one can point to the strong scien-tific basis on which they are founded. Yet most people have noidea how effective profiling is, let alone how it works, apart fromwhat they have picked up from the media.The aim of this article is to look beyond the ubiquitous mediahype that surrounds profiling and critically examine the reality.Initially the two main approaches to profiling will be examined insome detail, highlighting the differences and similarities of theapproaches. Profiling is usually conducted on serial offenders,which will also be examined, along with some of the researchfind-ings and controversies surrounding serial offenders. The ap-proaches to criminal profiling will then be examined in light oftwo criteria for a science: the need for a paradigm and the require-ment of falsifiability. The empirical support and problems witheach of the approaches will be discussed, as will the studies thathave empirically examined profiling. It is concluded that the cur-rent approaches to profiling do not yet have any substantialempirical support, but that they do have the potential to be scien-tific if they are worked on.WHAT IS CRIMINAL PROFILING?DefinitionsCriminal profiling is the process of using available informationabout a crime and crime scene to compose a psychological por-trait of the unknown perpetrator of the crime.1The informationthat the criminal profiler uses is often taken from the scene of thecrime, and takes into account factors such as the state of the crimescene, what weapons (if any) were used in the crime, and whatwas done and said to the victim. Other information used in crimi-nal profiling can include the geographic pattern of the crimes,how the offender got to and from the crime scene, and where theoffender lives. The actual process of profiling differs from oneprofiler to another (depending on the training of the profiler), butthe aim remains the same: to deduce enough about the behavioral,Muller /CRIMINAL PROFILING235