Understanding Criminal Behaviour: Beyond Red Dragon - University ...

investigations with an unrelenting glare of publicity on any technique used by the police,
especially anything remotely novel: the need for transparency and clarity is therefore of
paramount importance for all parties involved. It may not be so difficult to answer why
there are so few profiling cases made available for subsequent dissection and analysis –
we rarely hear of or see the failures. It is essential for the development of profiling that
the nature of the items provided in profiles must be individually assessed following the
conclusion of an investigation. This would allow us to check for instance, which aspects
of the profile have been correct, and which have been incorrect. It is inevitably the ‘hits’
we hear about through the media – often specific items of information provided in the
profile will be over-exaggerated in their importance (as evident in the Brussel case), but
the ‘misses’ still tend to be shrouded in embarrassment and acrimony, with no clear sense
of what was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about the profile. Relying on simplistic ‘accuracy rates’ to
ascertain whether or not profiling works can thus be misleading. Without access to
failures as well as successes, our conceptual development of this area will remain limited,
particularly regarding how we might refine the nature of profiling objectives to more
discrete, and possibly as a result, more achievable goals.
While most profilers operate alone in the construction of their profile, ‘group’
profiling is not necessarily more reliable: the team of psychologists and psychiatrists
established during the 1960s recommended to the police that the murders later associated
with Albert deSalvo, the “Boston Strangler”, were actually committed by two men, “each
of whom lived alone and probably worked as a schoolteacher” (Porter, 1983, p.3) and one
of whom was thought to be homosexual. In fact deSalvo lived with a wife, two children,
worked in the construction industry and as Porter reminds us, “would never have been
found by any of the policemen assigned to search the city’s homosexual community”
(p.3).
With this in mind, we should also note that the simplicity of definitions of profiling can
be deceptive in evaluating the effectiveness of the practice(s) of profiling (Howitt, 2002).
After all, all of the practices described in these forms of profiling reflect extremely
complex psychological issues that relate to behavioural consistency (i.e. incorporating
notions that we can actually derive any meaningful deductions or inferences at all from
crime scene ‘behaviours’ that enlighten us as to what ‘type’ of person the offender might
represent and the assumption that there is consistency in certain behaviours and
personality traits more generally), the homogeneity of types of offenders (a point
certainly represented in the FBI approach), and a host of other issues that, without
empirical research and hypothesis testing, leave aspirations to the scientific bases of
profiling wide open to easy criticism. The central hypothesis of profiling, according to
Canter and Heritage (1990) remains that “offenders differ in their actions when
committing a crime and that these differences reflect (and therefore correlate with)
overtly available features of the offender” p.187) – but this is certainly a hypothesis open
to empirical testing. If profiling is to be scientific (hence empirical), Boon (cited in
Woodhams, 2002, p.34-35) argues that we must accept that profiles must be falsifiable
and be “aiming to make a model of reality”. Boon argued that these difficulties could be
overcome in approaches to profiling, but that true empiricism is probably too great a goal
to aspire to. For present purposes, however, we can agree that the self-correcting nature
of the scientific method is absent from most approaches to profiling, and the
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