Criminal Profiling: How Does Criminal Profiling Work?

What is criminal profiling? How does criminal profiling work? Is it really all you see on TV? Many people believe everything they see on TV is true, but this is not the truth. Criminal profilers are trained FBI agents that use psychology and physical evidence to create a profile of what they believe the suspect looks or acts like. People need to be informed on what Criminal profiling, really is and how it started. People should see criminal profiling as a science that can help the FBI when they are catching crimianls.

To understand how criminal profiling helps the FBI today, first we need to go back to the beginning and look at the history of the profiling of crimianls and what exactly it is. Criminal profiling is when experts look at a scene

The first thing that criminal profilers do is go to the crime scene and gain information about the crime scene, such as such as pictures and information about the area. While at the crime scene, they are being to try to put themselves in the mind of a criminal to see what they maybe feeling or thinking. There are 4 main things that they look at to gain information about the criminal, the antecedent, Methods and manner, body disposal and the post offense behavior. (Winermen). They evaluate the information and start to form their profile from the information. After they talk to the victim and get a profile or look at the body. They also try to find a connection between the victim and the suspect. They then begin to look at all the evidence of the case; they even watch the interrogations. At the end of this process, they begin to form the most accurate profile they can. Then give this profile to the FBI and inform them on what they believe the best way to catch the suspect is. A visual chart from Matchware for more clarity is shown

At first, the goal of criminal profiling was just to narrow down the potential suspects, this has developed throughout time. Now the main goal of a criminal profiling is to create a profile to help find a suspect and to inform police how they should try to catch this suspect. These profilers and the profiles that they create may also be used in court when trying to convict a criminal. Some might say that it doesn’t help the FBI because it is just making an assumption based on experience and people can make the wrong profile causing them to arrest the wrong person. Although this maybe true, studies have shown that this rarely happens; “Yet, these researchers also reported that in 24.5 percent of the cases, profiles actually hindered the identification of a
suspect” (Scherer and Jarvis). Even from the beginning of the profiling process it has been proven to be affective in some sort even if others didn’t believe that criminal profiling would work. Criminal profilers continue to help to catch people, like in cases such as George Metesky’s case, The chigao bomber. Most of the time criminal profilers can at least be helpful to the FBI in a case. As stated before; “Overall, these results showed that of the 186 detectives surveyed, 14.1 percent reported that the advice assisted in solving the case, while 82.6 percent reported that the advice they received was useful”