- It's based on psychological theory, rather than police experience.
- One key theory is the "criminal consistency hypothesis". This is Canter's theory that criminals act in a consistent manner, and thus the characteristics they displayed in their crime are likely to be similar to how they are in their everyday lives.
- Interpersonal consistency: how the offender treated the victim may be characteristic of their approach to that race/culture/sexual orientation/gender. E.g. rapists may be aggressive to female co-workers.
- Spatial consistency: the offender is likely to commit somewhere that they are comfortable in - somewhere they know well. e.g. a murder may be committed en route to a friend's house or their workplace.
- It's based on patterns and objectivity, so it's often referred to as quantitative.
- It's appropriate for a wider range of crimes than the FBI approach, but works best for crimes such as murder and rape.
- It's called the bottom-up approach because the police look at details and use this to gradually build up the profile, whilst the top-down approach attempts to fit crime scenes under pre-existing categories.
Study: Copson conducted a study using detectives from 48 police forces in the UK. The study used self-report to gather data on the opinions on and potential for offender profiling. The results showed that a minority of detectives found profiling useful in solving the case, but that a fair number would use profiling again. It was concluded that offender profiling was effective in providing a valuable second opinion or supporting what the detectives thought, and suggested that better education in the theory behind profiling may develop trust in profiles.
