Deck 5: Section 1: Criminal Profiling and Psychological Autopsies

Question 1

How is profiling used in criminal investigations? Is it effective?

Answer 1

Main points:
• Profiling is used to generate some leads in pinpointing the suspect.
• Profiling is based on inferring the characteristics of the offender based on crime scene evidence.
• Profiling has received a lot of media attention but systematic research is very sparse.
• The existing research studies find that profiling has very limited to non-existent effectiveness and dubious accuracy.

Question 2

What is the purpose of a psychological autopsy and when would it be used?

Answer 2

Main points:
• Psychological autopsy is an effort to figure out the psychological state of a person before he or she died.
• Psychological autopsies are used in cases of equivocal deaths to help establish the cause of death.
• To classify the cause of death, the NASH system of death classification is used (natural, accidental, suicide, or homicide).
• The main reason to conduct the psychological autopsy is when insurance payment decision or decision about pursuing a criminal case depends on the cause of death determination.

Question 3

Compare and contrast criminal profiling, geographic profiling, and behavioral investigative advice (BIA).

Answer 3

Main points:
• All three types of profiling are intended to help investigators solve the crime by focusing their efforts in specific directions.
• Criminal profiling is a mainly based on intuition and tries to infer the personality of the criminal from crime scene evidence.
• Geographic profiling and BIA are more scientifically-based, objective techniques that do not try to penetrate the mind of the criminal.
• Geographic profiling uses maps and mathematics to predict the possible locations of future crimes based on locations of previous crimes.
• BIA uses the results of psychological research to help investigators with things like questioning the suspect or using the media.