FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY ESSAY PLANS
, ‘Discuss the top down approach to offender profiling.’
AO1:
Top down approach:
● Profilers start with a pre-established typology, working down to lower levels to assign
offenders to one of 2 offender categories based on witness accounts and evidence from
the crime scenes
Organised and disorganised types of crimes:
● Organised offenders show evidence of planning the crime in advance
○ The victim is deliberately targeted and the offender has a type of victim they seek
○ The offender conducts the crime with almost surgical precision
○ They tend to be very competent socially + sexually - some married w/ kids
● Disorganised offenders don’t plan and act impulsively
○ The crime scene reflects the nature of the attack = the body is often still there
○ They have a low IQ, are unskilled, and unemployed w/ failed relationships
○ They also live alone and close to where the incident took place
Constructing an FBI profile:
1. Data assimilation = profiler reviews evidence (crime scene photos, pathology reports,
witness reports, etc.)
2. Crime scene classification - organised or disorganised
3. Crime reconstruction = a hypothesis of what happened, how the victim behaved, etc.
4. Profile generation = hypotheses related to the offender, e.g. demographic background,
physical characteristics, behaviour, etc.
AO3:
Research support:
● There is support for the organised offender category
● Analysis using smallest space analysis found that to identify correlations between
samples of behaviour in 39 aspects of killing found that there is a subset of features
many serial killers had that matched FBI typology for organised offenders (Canter et. al)
● Suggests it has some validity
● BUT this is not completely applicable because killers may have multiple contradicting
characteristics (Godwin, 2002)
Wider application:
, ‘Discuss the top down approach to offender profiling.’
AO1:
Top down approach:
● Profilers start with a pre-established typology, working down to lower levels to assign
offenders to one of 2 offender categories based on witness accounts and evidence from
the crime scenes
Organised and disorganised types of crimes:
● Organised offenders show evidence of planning the crime in advance
○ The victim is deliberately targeted and the offender has a type of victim they seek
○ The offender conducts the crime with almost surgical precision
○ They tend to be very competent socially + sexually - some married w/ kids
● Disorganised offenders don’t plan and act impulsively
○ The crime scene reflects the nature of the attack = the body is often still there
○ They have a low IQ, are unskilled, and unemployed w/ failed relationships
○ They also live alone and close to where the incident took place
Constructing an FBI profile:
1. Data assimilation = profiler reviews evidence (crime scene photos, pathology reports,
witness reports, etc.)
2. Crime scene classification - organised or disorganised
3. Crime reconstruction = a hypothesis of what happened, how the victim behaved, etc.
4. Profile generation = hypotheses related to the offender, e.g. demographic background,
physical characteristics, behaviour, etc.
AO3:
Research support:
● There is support for the organised offender category
● Analysis using smallest space analysis found that to identify correlations between
samples of behaviour in 39 aspects of killing found that there is a subset of features
many serial killers had that matched FBI typology for organised offenders (Canter et. al)
● Suggests it has some validity
● BUT this is not completely applicable because killers may have multiple contradicting
characteristics (Godwin, 2002)
Wider application:
