Free Custom «Psychological Profiling» Essay Paper

Planning and strategizing is the best cover-up to a crime. Many a times we have heard that to catch a thief, you should get another thief to do for you that work. However, it would turn up to be a waste of time and resources to spend energy on creating thieves. Creating people who think like thieves is, however, acceptable and appropriate. Psychological profiling deals with the issue of creating a platform for people to think and reason like criminals.

The History of Psychological Profiling

The history of psychological profiling dates back to the middle ages. However, the real benefit of psychological profiling was realized in the early 19th century. The basic technology used at that era of world wars relied on intellectual physical condition professionals to fashion a sketch of a criminal in order to assist the law enforcement in the investigation. The first ever-renowned case was that analyzed by James Brussels. Brussels did a fantastic job on sketching down the psychological part of the mad bomber in New York. Brussels’ work attracted the F.B.I division. The F.B.I relied on the schematic used by Brussels for their new technology, psychological profiling. Another renowned case is that of jack the ripper. However, this does not mean that psychological profiling is only a thing of the 19th and 20th century. Psychological profiling started way back in the Middle Ages. The only limitation of its usage and advancement was that the people involved in that field lacked the systematic and anatomical acquaintance of a surgeon or psychiatrist (Dwyer, 2001). On the way to comprehend what has transpired, one should be in a position to understand every step that the criminal has taken and reconstruct the crime backwards. This enables one to construct the behavioral blueprint of the goon.

 

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Empirical Evidence of the Efficiency of the Psychological Profiling

Psychological profiling has proved to be helpful enough. There are multiple cases of psychological profiling success. The success has not only been achieved in criminal cases, but also in real life setting such as home and school. Let take an example that something was stolen in the work place. Even before the staff thought of calling the police, they will already have their own profile. When the police arrive, they will ask the staff whom they suspect and why they suspect that person. This already is in itself psychological profiling. Therefore, psychological profiling is an excellent tool to be relied upon by the law enforcement body. It helps the police in narrowing down the likely suspects of a crime. Progression in artificial intelligence as well as neural networks and geometric profiling computer programs has led to the results that are even more accurate.

Criminal profiling is relied upon not only to trace potential criminals, but also to narrow down a list of suspects that have already been accumulated by the police. By reviewing the blueprint and intentions of previous offenders, profiling enables investigators to reasonably and precisely envisage the personality of present and potential offenders. Such schemes allow to trap murderers and other perpetrators before they can commit other crimes.

Types of Crimes in which Profiling Seems to Work the Best

The most common cases that are handled by psychological profiling are murder and rape. These cases are best suited to use the technology of psychological profiling. This is due to the nature of requirements needed to solve such cases. To solve a psychological profiling case, it requires a question like the personality of an offender. The closest crimes connected to personality and emotional crime is rape and murder. These personality issues are the ones that may lead to someone committing murder or rape.

The questions asked are based on antecedent, method, and manner, body handling and post-offense behavior in regard to the crime committed. Crimes that show organizational element are also remarkably easy to handle using psychological profiling. This is due to the idea that any organized crime can be reconstructed from the occurrence to the planning. The structure in place for psychological profiling crime solving technique is based on crimes of passion. Offenders known to the victims mostly commit crime of passion. However, copycat crimes are even easier to track with psychological profiling in place.

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Steps Used in the Process of Constructing a Psychological Profile

At times, crimes can be terribly hard to solve. Some criminal cases can last up to lifetime to solve. With the aid of psychological profiling, crime solving becomes even easier. To achieve full benefit of psychological profiling, step by step process has to be followed. The process has to consider the time of crime, relation of crime between the victim an offender, antecedent, manner of crime, evidence disposal by suspect and post-offense behavior (Harrower, 2001).

The first step is to identify the plan, fantasy, and motive of the offender. With this in mind, one can narrowly select the groups of people who can commit such a crime. Second, it is important to identify what victim the offender selected and why it was easy for the offender to select such a victim. This relationship will enable the officers to establish the relationship between victim and offender. The next step that follows is in accordance to evidence collected from the crime scene.

Information Collected about the Victim

Forensic specialist Richard Kocsis, PhD, and his contemporaries have come up with structures based on massive lessons from murderers and rapists that act as a channel of profiling such crimes. The structures are just like the proverbial clinical questions used by doctors to diagnose patients. The second step towards unearthing criminals using psychological profiling is collecting evidence from the victim. The victim helps in providing the image of what the offender looked like and the offender’s motives or fantasy. If the victim is not alive, then information can be collected from the crime scene. Victim is directly connected to the offenders in a crime. A superb example is just like a lion selects a prey, so does the criminals. The best part of psychological profiling is to get into the criminal’s mind. Getting into the criminal’s mind involves knowing the thinking pattern of criminals and how they select the prey and what prey they select.

Psychological Profiling, Crime Scene Profiling, and Offender Profiling

Offender profiling is a technique of recognizing the executor of a crime based on psychoanalysis of the personality of the crime and the manner in which it was committed.  This technique mainly deals with the personality of the offender to determine the   multiple choices that led the offender to choose a victim. This data is pooled with other pertinent facts and physical evidence and then contrasted with the uniqueness of known trait types and mental aberration to develop a practical functioning description of the criminal (Dennis, 2006). Psychological profiling, however, is a method based only on suspect identification which seeks to identify a person’s psychological, emotional, and individuality personality (as evident in things done or left at the felony scene).

In criminal psychological profiling, a crime scene profiling helps to label the executor as prearranged, confused, or mixed. Prearranged offender strategizes ahead picking out the casualty in advance of time. Crime scene profiling deals with the object and evidence relation with the offender or the victim. Crime scene investigates the nature of crime, the extent of crime and the tools used in assisting the crime. All these tools serve as third parties to a crime.