Evaluating Offender Profiling - PCJS PDF

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Evaluating Offender Profiling...

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Psychology and The Criminal Justice System Evaluating Offender Profiling Complexity: Typologies Limitations of the data;  Difficulty of working with internal psychological processes  Generalisations from limited samples Underlying assumptions (Canter, Alison, Alison and Wentink, 2004);  Characteristics within each type co-occur with regularity  Characteristics defining one type do not occur with characteristics with another typetypes should be mutually exclusive  Clear set of criteria to determine what mix of characteristics needed for someone to be assigned to a type Exercise Consider the case of Albert Howard Fish – Use internet to find information about him. Is he an ‘organised non-social’ or ‘disorganised asocial’ serial killer? What do you base your profile on? Reminder

The ‘Mixed’ Serial Killer?  Introduced by Douglas, Burgess, Burgess and Ressler (1992)  Cases where ‘circumstances beyond the killer’s control’ intervene, e.g. o Unanticipated events o Victim responds unexpectedly o Killer changes pattern during event or series

Psychology and The Criminal Justice System 

The need for ‘mixed’ category highlights the problems with the typology

Testing the Typologies Canter, Alison & Wentink (2004): organised/disorganised  Within-type consistency – should be high, but was low  Between-type consistency – should be low, but comparable to above  Conclusion: most serial murder shows ‘organised’ behaviours Canter & Wentink (2004): Holmes’ types – general critiques  Validity of data collection  Lack of empirical testing  Lack of definite description of terms  Overlap between types  empirical testing

Don’t see organised actions grouping in one area, instead we see a lot of mixing

Psychology and The Criminal Justice System

(Canter and Wentink figures) Complexity: Expertise?  Pinizzotto and Finkel (1990): profiling experts 67% accuracy rating vs non-experts 57% accuracy rating when predicting offender traits  Kocsis, Middledorp and Karpin (2008): meta-analysis shows much higher accuracy for profilers (66%) than non-profilers (34%)  Differences depend on how strictly ‘profiling expert’ is defined  Alison, Smith and Morgan (2003): police positive of profiles even including inaccurate information – gave police officers an FBI style profile to evaluate against the facts of a convicted offender Complexity: Theoretical concerns ‘Barnum effect’ (Alison & Barrett, 2004): ambiguous or false information interpreted as accurate and assigned meaning post-hoc  Theoretical evaluations (Alison et al 2002) o Simplistic and outdated understanding of personality and trait approach – unlikely that broad personality types relate to clusters of sociodemographic characteristics o ‘Personality paradox’ = readiness to explain behaviour in terms of dispositions even though evidence demonstrates the importance of situation  Person x Situation, ‘if… then…’ contingencies  Complexity: Development and Change Canter & Youngs (2009);  Responsiveness (context!)  Maturation  Cognitive development  Learning  Career development  Cultural changes SITUATION- give examples of how changing situational demands might change the way the offender behaves during the course of the crime – Complexity: A  C and ‘contingency destabilisation’  A → C not a collection of 1-2-1 relationships but “a combination of interacting action variables that map on to a combination of interacting characteristic variables” (Canter, 2017: 165)  = a particular action does not map to a particular characteristics in a simple of direct way Youngs(2008): contingency destabilisation  Action can indicate more than one characteristic  Characteristic can be inferred from different actions  Actions can indicate different characteristic depending on the context, or the stage of criminal’s career

Psychology and The Criminal Justice System

Exercise Crime Description A; One Monday afternoon in November, a suburban house in Manchester is burgled. The offender disabled the alarm, then entered by smashing a downstairs window. He stole cash and jewellery, without making any mess, but leaving fingerprints. The larger electronic goods in the house were not stolen. Just as he was about to leave, the offender encountered the occupant and reacted violently punching her in the face several times before running off. Crime Description B; At 2 a.m. one Saturday morning, a suburban house in Manchester is burgled. The offender disabled the alarm, then entered by smashing a downstairs window. He stole cash and jewellery, without making any mess, but leaving fingerprints. The larger electronic goods in the house were not stolen. Just as he was about to leave, the offender encountered the occupant and reacted violently punching her in the face several times before running off. Analyse these two crimes. What characteristics could we infer from the actions? Complexity: Temporal Aspects  Offender actions often a decision in response to the situation, which is dynamic. Yet temporal aspects ignored in most OP  Meier, Kennedy & Sacco (2001: 1) “a comprehensive model of crime. must be attentive to offenders and victims as well as to the contexts within which they interact” Fossi, Clarke & Lawrence (2005): action phases 1. Search 2. Selection 3. Approach 4. Assault  Decisions at each phase will reveal offender’s character (cognitions, expectations, personality) Exercise: Post on Padlet In groups, consider what different options and considerations the offender would have at each phase of the offence. What situational determinants could influence decisions at each phase? 1. Search – how does the offender find victim, search strategy, ‘hunting process’? 2. Selection – how is the potential target identified, what influences selection? 3. Approach – how is the victim approached/engaged, how is this influenced by the motivation? 4. Assault – what happens during the assault, how might this change depending on the situation (e.g. victim behaviour) Action Phases  Search, e.g. Rossmo’s (2000) hunting patterns

Psychology and The Criminal Justice System  Hunters  Poachers  Trollers  Trappers  Selection  Rational choice theory (Cornish & Clarke, 1986)  Routine activity theory (Cohen & Felson, 1979)  Victim preference & vulnerability, e.g. adult or child victims for sexual offenders  Approach, e.g. Beauregard et al (2007)  Coercive  Manipulative  Non-persuasive  Also: impact of motivation and affect  Assault  Crime scene actions, typologies and themes from previous OP research Goodwill et al (2016)  Study of sexual offending, emphasising the changing context of crime  69 male offenders, in total responsible for 347 stranger sexual offences  Semi-structured interviews + case file review  Two-step cluster analysis + multiple correspondence analysis Exercise: Find the article Look at the results + summarise them by phase What is the relationship with offender characteristics? Conclusions...