As society keeps expanding, through growth and technology, more opportunities for crimes pop up in our daily lives, ranging from internet gambling, all the way to insider trading. But as with any criminal movement, criminal justice is not far behind. Half the battle of fighting crime is knowing what to look for, and the other half is knowing how to stop it. Criminal profiling does both, and being in a generation with James Holmes and The Columbine shooting, there couldn’t be a better time for criminal profiling. But despite criminal profiling being used in complex investigations, and in a number of jurisdictions, as expert evidence in criminal trials, it hasn’t been proved to be an exact science. This paper will explore evidence for and against criminal profiling by looking at the essence of criminal profiling, the concerns, and the success of criminal profiling. …show more content…
While criminal profiling derives from the concepts of psychology, which is an acknowledged school of science, the question is whether this is just an educated guess or a science as well. When faced with a crime, a police investigator must figure the most appropriate way to peruse and identify the culprit from the given information (evidence.) But sometimes it’s not that easy. When there are no witnesses, or forensic evidence, they must go look for probable suspects. That is when criminal profiling comes in to play, as it creates a “biological sketch of behavioral patterns, trends, and tendencies” (Rossi, 1982) So from evidence inferences that may be made about the psychological relationship between crimes and offenders, we can deduce potential suspect, giving cranial investigators leads. As “criminals are distinct in personality or psychological profiles.” (Anastasi, 1976). But the degree of how accurate criminal profiling may be brought into