Psychological Profiling

Psychological profiling has been around for many years dating back to about 1960. It was credited to Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany because they made the first behavioral analyses for difficult cases (psychologytoday.com n.d.). It first started with Howard Teten compiling a collection of analysis and comparisons. He would than reviewed a few homicides from several police departments and then tested himself with them and how he would approach the case by setting up an experiment. Therefore, once he received all of the data he would prepare a tentative description of the perpetrator (psychologytoday.com. n.d.). Although, he started his study in 1960 it wasn’t until 1970 when in offered his first profile which was the stabbing murder of a woman

n.d.). Even though, in 1997 in the United Kingdom profiling assisted investigators in furthering their understanding of the case. There was only a small percentage of cases reported that profiling had assisted the police in solving the actual case and there was even a smaller percentage of reporting that the usage of profiling helped police in identifying the criminal in a case. Yet, 82.6% of those interviewed had said that profiling was operationally useful and 60.9% stated that profiling enhanced their understanding of the case they were handling (abrbradozier.wordpress.com. n.d.).

Profiling has seemed to work best for serial crimes such as rape and murder. The reasons it works the best for these type cases is because the criminal is on a crime spree which in return helps the investigator predict their next move and what type of person they may be. This is done because the offender would go from one state of mind to another which will also help the profiler or investigator track them down because they would be able to predict what the person may try to do next because of all the evidence they have left behind from previous crimes they have

Now psychological profiling which is also known as behavioral criminal personality and criminal profiling is a method that investigators use to develop a profile of a murder, rapists as well as other violent criminals who have not been caught by police officers yet for a crime they committed. On the other hand offender profiling is the belief that it may be possible to work out the characteristics of an offender by simply examining the characteristics of their offences. Therefore, the investigator would use all of the available information they have found about a crime, a crime scene or a victim to build a profile of the criminal or offender. Therefore, crime scene profiling would be when an investigator takes the physical evidence, that was collected and properly analyzed by specialists from a crime scene and systematically reconstruct the scene of the crime in order to get a strategy that will help them to capture the