Offender profiling is sometimes referred to criminal profiling. What this is, in its simplest, is a way of mapping the behaviour and tracking down who the perpetrator is and where they reside. There have been two high profile cases of David Canter and Paul Britton of which they did not display the same results as one another. Through what has been found with these two profiles I will assess the usefulness of offender profiling in order to catch criminals and whether or not it prevents crime; moreover, I shall then go on to explain about the two cases that the two profilers previously mentioned in the latter part of my essay along with the different types of profiling in the form of geographical, Statistical/Analytical/Evidential Profiling and …show more content…
One man who saw that it had the upmost potential was criminologist Cesare Lombroso. His idea was that perpetrators of crime all have similar faces and similar size skulls. However, recent developments in the area of offender profiling have narrowed down different systems used in profiling. Holmes and Holmes (2002) have devised a three step of the main goals in what profilers aim to achieve. The main step is to “provide the criminal justice system with a sociological and psychological assessment of the offender” (Holmes et al 2002) the others are to evaluate assessments and suggest strategies to capture the criminal. Throughout the northern hemisphere there are currently various styles of profiling. In the United Kingdom the style of profiling used is the bottom up approach, an example of the bottom up approach is Statistical/Analytical/Evidential Profiling. This method is where the profilers gather all the evidence first and then make assumptions from that evidence to find the perpetrator. Due to them working from facts this is known as deductive …show more content…
As of 2005, it is not useful for solitary crimes, crimes where offenders travel great distances between offenses.” (World of forensic science) There are however some downfalls with the geographical approach of which the previous quote was one. In addition to this drawback there is the underlying truth that it does not solve crimes geographical profiling only narrows the information down to where the perpetrator could live. Even then they may not reside there. Another criticism is that it requires a lot of skill and only specialists would be able to use it