Criminal Profiling: The Effectiveness Of Criminal Profiling

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In many countries, an issue of serial killers has always been scrutinized and considered as extremely serious. The United States is not an exception. Recently, a number of serial killers on the US territory has been increasing remarkably (Criminology: The Essentials 2013, 115). There are many traditional methods aimed to identify this criminals such as examination of witnesses, search for suspect with a motive; however, these methods provide a limited success in comparison with other, new and nonconventional, method called ‘criminal profiling’. The criminal profiling is based on the deduction of specific evidentiary patterns, observation of physical evidence, and the extrapolation of those patterns into a detailed description of the behavioral …show more content…

The main purpose of this work is to find out how the criminal profiling is effective. The report will claim that the method of criminal profiling in many instances does not help investigators to tackle the problem. The reasons for this are the
Criminal profiling (also known as a psychological profiling or offender profiling) is an investigative tool, which consists of analyzing the crime scene and using the conclusions to determine the identity of the serial killer used by law enforcement agencies. Criminal profilers create a psychological portrait and then determine location of the offenders by gathering their personal attributes from crime scene behavior in order to assist in detection of them. In order to create the profile …show more content…

In order to become the FBI agent, a person has to finish bachelor degree in the forensic science, or psychology, or sociology. This rule works for every unit in the organization except the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU). This is the unit where all FBI profilers work. In order to be admitted in this unit, the person can have degree in any field. The reason for this is that no university teaches the techniques necessary for performing the criminal profiling, as the method is still being considered as controversial. The FBI forensic psychologist Anthony Pinizzotto found that from 192 requests for criminal profiles, only 17% in fact were used to help in the suspect