Criminal Profiling Case Study

Law enforcement officials and criminologists have attempted to study the motives of serial killers for years. Each serial killer has specific, distinct motivations, however, there are categorized patterns or typologies. The first typology is visionary serial killers. Visionaries commit murder at the command of psychotic breaks such as listening to voices from deities like God and the Devil. While many serial killers do not have a specific type of victim, visionaries have an ideal victim and select them based on their own logic (Bonn). An example of this is David Berkowitz, also known as the Son of Sam, who murdered six people from thirteen attacks in a one year span, from July 1976 to July 1977. Berkowitz claimed his neighbor’s dog was “possessed …show more content…
Snook et al. explain many people deem criminal profilers capable of predicting a criminal’s behavior, but various experts argue “this belief may be an illusion and … people may have been misled into believing criminal profiling works despite no sound theoretical grounding and no strong empirical support” (1257). Their study was an analysis of a vast array of investigations. Snook et al. outline knowledge on criminal profiling (CP) and with said information they argue that CP has “no basis in scientific theory and has meager empirical support” (1258). To start their argument, they explain criminal profiling occurs in three stages—collecting data from the crime scene, forwarding the crime data to a profiler for predictions and the predictions are reported to investigating officers. Snook et al. establish the lack of scientific basis of criminal profiling by asserting (a) most typologies used for criminal profiling are false, (b) most CP approaches are based on theories of personalities which are outdated by now due to their lack of empirical support, and (c) there is no evidence that professional profilers have deliberated predictions which were more accurate than those made by nonprofilers. The most common typology used for CP is the FBI’s dichotomy of organized and disorganized criminals based on what they observe on the crime scene. This dichotomy is used to predict personality traits of the criminal and their behaviors. Studies have shown this is not viable, one of them being Canter et al.’s “Organized/Disorganized Typology of Serial Murder: Myth or Model” investigation. They perused 100 murders committed by serial killers where the organized and disorganized dichotomy was used. Their analysis did not reveal subsets of the organized or disorganized behaviors, concluding it is difficult to correctly see how murderers could be classified by