Unlocking the Mind of a Criminal: Offender Profiling Techniques Revealed

Abstract

Offender profiling Offender or criminal profiling is a practice of evaluating crime behaviours to predict the likely attributes of the offender. In the video, it is open that although most of the serious crime has an obvious suspect, some though serious like serial killing or multiple rapists do not have an obvious suspect (0:08-17). In cases of serious crimes that lack an obvious suspect, the police bring in a psychological profiler to conduct offender profiling and give recommendation on the most likely perpetrator of the noted crimes. According to the video, most of the criminal profilers use clues available at the crime scene to generate a criminal profile. What does this imply? The psychological profilers perform a thorough evaluation or examination of the crime scene to identify any notable psychological traits of the suspect. These psychological traits range from behavioural patterns, demographic variations and psychopathologies with personality and behaviour being the most notable within a crime scene. While analysing the suspects’ behavioural pattern, these psychological profilers relate the nature of crimes with their occurrences. How often does the suspect commit the crime under investigation and what might foster such crimes based on the nature of the crime scene. The crime scene might offer the investigators viable open clues like blood stains, torn garment, a jewel or even some fingerprints unconsciously left on the crime scenes which upon investigation offers the criminals blood group and nature. Blood group and finger prints are very essential especially when linked with the nature of crime like rape or murder because it either offers the identity of the perpetrator or the offended or both. In a great example that linked railway rapists to murderer it is open that the nature of compiling the offender profile took the form of consideration of the characteristics of the suspect based on the multiple rapes within the railway as the crime scene and the victims murdered body dumping site with their hands tied and cloths torn (1:50-2:20). The psychologists noted that the blood group of the rapist matched that of the murderer confirming their hypothesis that...