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2.13 - Offender profiling

from Part II - Assessments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Jennifer M. Brown
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
Elizabeth A. Campbell
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
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Summary

By the 1970s police forces throughout the USA were referring to the process of speculating about the characteristics of offenders they were looking for as 'offender profiling'. Accounts of 'offender profiling' have always been confused by the mixture of myth and reality that exist within Thomas Harris' and many subsequent fictional portrayals. Drawing on a background in social and environmental psychology, the author has demonstrated in Criminal Shadows that the central question of offender profiling is to establish the basis for making inferences from offence actions to offender characteristics. The range of scientific questions inherent in offender profiling have been shown by Canter to be a subset of a broader range of issues in psychology that are relevant to police investigations. This places offender profiling within a more general field named Investigative Psychology. This more academically grounded approach is opening up the potential applications of psychological science.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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