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Offender Profiling Case Study

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Introduction:

• Offender profiles are extremely useful in all types of police investigations.
• Offender profiles narrow down potential suspects leading to quicker arrests, they can be applied in virtually all types of crime and can give another avenue into finding the offender if there is a lack of physical evidence at a crime scene.

Grounds I: Narrow down potential suspects in a crime

Evidence/Reason:
• As evidenced in the case study “State of California v. Louis J. Peoples.”, offender profiling was conducted in a serial killer investigation in which the profile showed that the suspect knew the area. After a spree of murders, it took only one day from when the profile was provided, to lead to an arrest of the murderer who was a local …show more content…

Analysis of the scene, including factors such as method of entry to the location or whether the scene has been staged and much more, can provide invaluable information to investigators based on the profile. (Brent E, Turvey, 2011).

Warrant:
• Narrowing down suspects means that police can apprehend offenders faster, leading to the saving of lives in cases of serial killers and abductions.
• This can also save police resources in investigations if they are looking for the wrong type of suspect, giving them more power to find the offender.

Backing:
• “Detectives using a behavioural analysis approach isolated a total of forty-four intruder sexual attacks from a pool of in excess of one hundred and fifty unsolved similar crimes and attributed those crimes to the Operations Park serial rapist.” (Manning, John, 2009). This drastic number of people filtered out of a series of crimes led to identifying the serial offender within a few months, showing just how useful offender profiles are in certain …show more content…

Brussel said that “He would be unmarried, foreign, self-educated, in his 50s, living in Connecticut, paranoid and with a vendetta against Con Edison--the first bomb had targeted the power company's 67th Street headquarters.” This profile proved to be extremely accurate and led to an arrest and confession shortly thereafter (Winerman, Lea, 2004).

Warrant:
• Whether it is a hostage situation, a serial bombing campaign or any manner of crime, there will always be a signature or MO from which to compile an offender profile, giving police investigators a useful description to start their search for the offender.

Backing:
• Holmes and Holmes showed that "the signature of a perpetrator is the unique manner in which he or she commits crimes. A signature may be the manner in which the person kills, certain words a rapist uses with victims, a particular manner in which a perpetrator leaves something at crime scenes, or some other indicator” (Ebisike, Borbert, 2007). No matter what type of crime it is, profiles can be compiled and become the key to the capture of the

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