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by Bethany Steichen
Watching the brutal cannibal Hannibal Lector so accurately pinpoint FBI trainee Clarice Starling's origins and ambitions in Silence of the Lambs taught us to be wary of letting a criminal psychologist get too close. But how accurate is offender profiling, and how useful is it for identifying and apprehending criminals?
These are the questions addressed in a recent lecture by Dr. John Horgan, professor of applied psychology at University College Cork in Ireland. According to Horgan, forensic or criminal psychology is "the application of psychological principles and knowledge to legal issues and the criminal justice system." This definition includes far more than just the maverick profiler solving bizarre crimes that we see in movies.
Criminal psychologists are frequently hired by police to work on investigational issues, occupational stress management, and interrogation techniques. They are also often used by the courts to determine who should sit on juries and as special witnesses attesting to the mental state of the defendant at the time of a crime.
Criminal psychologists also work within the penal and welfare services systems, focusing on victimization, terrorism, pedophilia, and offender profiling.
This final category has garnered cinematic fame for criminal psychologists --although less than two percent of the profession is involved in constructing profiles, and no criminal psychologist profiles full time. The lack of demand can be accounted for by the narrow band of crimes that are eligible for criminal profiling investigation.
A profile is a subjective description of a criminal based on evidence from the crime scene, clinical data, and crime trends, statistical models, and personal experience. It usually contains speculation about the criminal's age, gender, race, educational background, economic status, and general employment record.
Profiles also seek to reconstruct the sequence of events of the crime and of the criminal's behavior. There is also the built-in assumption that a criminal's personality is expressed in the crime. Conclusions are drawn based on the psychologist's previous experience and trends in criminal behavior. For example, serial killers rarely kill outside their racial background. For example, if victims are white, the killer is most likely white as well.
Of course, not all cases are suitable for profiling. Profiles are used almost exclusively for the most brutal crimes that are repetitious and unusual. Often a signature aspect--such as characteristic order of criminal events, ritual behavior, or displaying victims in a certain way for shock value--must be identified before a case is considered a candidate for offender profiling.
In fact, offender profiling has its origins in investigations of ritualistic cult crimes. Documentation dating back to the early 1820s shows attempts to link types of crimes to the physical characteristics of a criminal, particularly sloping brows and scarring. In the 1890s, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes used early profiling techniques to solve crimes, foreshadowing the modern media's fascination with the technique.
In 1943, Britain's Office of Strategic Services hired psychiatrist Walter Langer to profile Adolph Hitler. As Hitler was never captured and interrogated, many of Langer's predictions were untested, but Langer did state that Hitler would most likely commit suicide rather than be assassinated or flee to another country. This assessment proved accurate when he shot himself in his bunker in the face of defeat in 1945.
Since then the FBI has been the most prominent force in offender profiling. In the mid-1970s the Behavioral Science Unit established a classification system based on 36 serial killer cases that is still used today.
After an extensive review of the case files and interviews with the serial killers themselves, researchers found that serial killers tend to be either "organized" or "disorganized" (although there is also a "mixed" category) and share many common characteristics.
Categorization of profiled criminals by the FBI hasn't changed much since the original 36 serial killers were investigated 30 years ago.
This fact highlights one of the most significant challenges to profiling today: There is little empirical data available, so profiling is as much an art as it is a science. The craft hinges on a psychologist's ability to synthesize knowledge of criminology and crime trends with inferences drawn from crime scene evidence. Criminal psychologists face other difficulties as well: the reliability of evidence (whether or not the victim or objects have been moved), the late stage at which profilers are called into an investigation (often as a last resort), and a lack of criteria for a successful profile.
The statistical models used to make judgments aren't completely error-proof either. Several assumptions are made based on a very small pool of data, including the assumption that criminal behavior really gives clues to noncriminal behavior.
So while profiling is regarded as a somewhat untested and inaccurate method of criminal investigation among law enforcement professionals, a few famous cases (both real and fictional) have created a media sensation.
What's next for this fascinating field? Tune in to your favorite news station for further developments.
In 1940, fear gripped New York City after a bomb exploded at the Consolidated Edison Company. As time passed, the bombs grew in size and sophistication and targets seemed to have little to do with one another. The bomber's hits included phone booths, rest rooms, movie theaters and Grand Central Station. He began leaving notes at sites which connected his targets: "Wherever a wire runs...gas or steam flows...from or to the Con Edison Company.. is now a bomb target...my life is dedicated to the task."
After 16 years of fruitless searching and over 30 bombings, police enlisted the help of a New York psychiatrist, James Brussels. After reviewing the notes, photographs, and accumulated files, Brussels concluded that the bomber was most likely "a heavy man. Middle aged. Foreign born. Roman Catholic. Single. Lives with a brother or sister. When you find him, chances are he will be wearing a double breasted suit. Buttoned." The profile also included speculations that the man was paranoid, doted upon by his mother, hated his father, and lived in Connecticut.
In 1956 George Metesky, a 54-year-old single Lithuanian man living in Waterbury, Connecticut, with his two unwed sisters, was questioned concerning the connection between the bombings and a complaint that he had lodged against Consolidated Edison Co. in the early 1930s. He claimed that he had contracted tuberculosis on the job, but Con Ed rejected the claim as "medically impossible". Metesky freely admitted to being the Mad Bomber and showed the police the lab he had used to manufacture his bombs. He was also wearing a buttoned double-breasted suit.
In late 2002, a sniper terrorized the Washington, D.C., area, and the media swooped down for 24/7 coverage. Part of this attention included numerous interviews with profilers from a variety of locations and backgrounds, each theorizing who the sniper might be. Speculations were based on recent attacks around America: al-Qaida operatives, disgruntled militia members, and loners in the mountains of Montana all jumped to the lips of speculators.
New York City homicide detective Bo Dietl thought that it was most likely the work of "...two skinny kids out there who have made a pact with each other." Boston criminologist Jack Levin believed that the sniper had "other responsibilities in his life. He may be married. He may be playing with his children, watching football on Sunday, or he may have a part-time job."
Overall, the media seemed to have fixed on the sniper's identity as a lone white man in his thirties who had a military background.
The last part at least was correct, however, experience in the Persian Gulf was about the only thing that unemployed, 41-year-old African American John Allen Muhammad and 17-year-old Jamaican high school student Lee Malvo had in common with the profiles for this case.
This calls into question how many criminals are overlooked because police are sticking too close to profiles.
In the aftermath, Dietl stated that he would "never in a million years" have guessed that two African Americans would have been arrested. He went on to say that he felt as if her were "part of the case, because I was on TV so much. I wanted people to feel that they could be a detective and that they could be the one who captures these parasites."
Television news stations stand by their decision to air profiles as part of the news coverage. Sue Bunda, a senior vice president at CNN, said that in the unfolding discussion of a story, "We lean on these folks who have expertise to help guide our viewers through it. I was quite proud of the seriousness of the way we covered it." Backing this idea, MSNBC vice president Mark Effron says that "as long as we qualify it [as speculation], it's clear to the view that [the expert] doesn't have definitive inside information."
However you choose to view the media attention of the D.C.-area sniper, the case does show how profiling is still an art as well as a science and that it's not always possible to predict the human mind.
