Xue Cheng
Professor Betty Bettacchi
English 1301, WS4
17 June 2018
Psychological Profiling: Mind Hunter
Some people are crazy fans loving books, films, and TV shows that investigate the crime and locate the defender by using psychological profiling as a tool. For instance, popular dramas, Criminal Minds, describes the FBI profilers analyze the criminal mind to narrow down the suspects and figure out who is the criminal. Also, the Netflix series, Mindhunter, tells the story about FBI agents, Holden Ford and Bill Tench, find the clues from the criminal profiling to catch serial offenders.
Psychological profiling (also known as criminal profiling, offender profiling, crime scene profiling, or personality profiling) is an investigative technique
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During the 1960s, FBI began to use the criminal profiling in the investigation on the basis of their education and practical experience. Then twenty years later, there is a great development in the Behavioral Science Unit that studied the profiling-related research and training. With the help of the Behavioral Science Unit, the FBI formalized the psychological profiling methods. From 1976 to 1979, after interviewing and analyzing 36 serial criminals, FBI developed the theories of different types of criminals based on their criminal profiling. Nowadays, modern psychological profiling mainly focuses on the study of the offender’s criminal behavior, psychology, and physical …show more content…
How do investigators use criminal profiling to locate the offender? In the essay, Criminal profiling: the reality behind the myth, Lea Winerman declares this process through an example. To know the personality of the offender, FBI agents create the criminal profiling by analyzing information from the questions related to the criminal’s behavior in the four crime stages: antecedent tendencies, method and manner, body disposal and post offense. Antecedent tendencies focus on figuring out what triggers the criminal to act, and method and manner aim to find out what types of victims the criminal looks for and what method the offender chooses to kill or torture the victims. Body disposal tries to figure out whether the place of body disposal is the first crime scene while post offense means to find out whether the offender inclined to involve himself in the investigation. Most serial cases can be analyzed in this way, but some cases, such as rape cases, should analyze the information from the victims as well. Also, John E. Douglas describes the general process of psychological profiling in his article, Criminal profiling from crime scene analysis. He states six stages of the stages including “profiling inputs, decision-process models, crime assessment, the criminal profile, investigation, and