Criminal profiling is one of the great approaches used by law enforcement and investigative agencies in many countries. Criminal profiling can be called as psychological profiling and even offender profiling. Criminal profiling is a primary way, which supports investigators to gather information and profile an unknown criminal based on offenders’ characteristics, such as behaviours, nature and style of the offenders (Fintzy, 2000) [6]. However, many opinions argue that offender profiling is not compelling evidence and science, so this method should not be applied in criminal investigations, while other people claim that psychological profiling is an effective tool in detecting and investigating the criminals. This paper will give empirical …show more content…
, 2008) [17]. In recently, practices of psychological profiling take part in several kinds of typology system. The typology system is used to categorize characteristics of criminals and behavioral offenders (Snook et al. , 2008) [17]. Profiling typologies were developed by FBI from interviews with criminals (Ressler, Burgess, Douglas, Hartman, and D’Agostino, 1986) [15]. Based on this classification, the offenders could be categorized as disorganized (low functioning) or organized (high functioning); offenses could be categorized as disorganized (for example: unplanned) or organized (for instance: planned). Between offenders and offenses have a correspondence, for instance, disorganized criminals commit disorganized crimes and organized criminals commit organized crimes (Ressler, Burgess, Douglas, Hartman, and D’Agostino, 1986) [14]. Snook et al. (2008) [17] indicated that this classification system does not connect the changes in behaviours of the offender. Canter, Alison, and Wentink (2004) [1] examined more than 100 murders and pointed out that whether these murders were committed by serial homicides in the USA can be categorized as disorganized or organized. And they also analyzed 40 behaviours of crime scene categorized as disorganized or organized in the crime classification manual of FBI (Ressler, Douglas, Burgess, and Burgess, 1992) [14]. However, the prediction from the classification, the examination did not show the distinction of disorganized and organized behaviours. Therefore, in this approach, it is not easy to realize serial killers could be easily categorized (Doan, and Snook, 2008) [4]. In other words, offender profiling has the effectiveness such as a lack of evidence in to evaluate distinction between profilers and non profilers and failure of profiling