Is criminal profiling flawed and disorderly?
It’s a staple of cop shows, but the jury’s still out on claims that criminals’ identities can be deduced from their modus operandi WHEN Derrick Todd Lee was arrested in 2003 for a spate of brutal murders in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the public reaction was a mixture of relief and outrage: relief that he was off the streets, outrage that he had not been caught sooner, given his track record of sexual and violent crime. One reason the police gave for the delay in tracking him down was that they had been looking for a white man, based on an FBI profile. Lee was black. Just months earlier, criminal profilers made the same mistake in the case of the Beltway sniper, who was using a high-powered rifle to pick off drivers in the Washington DC area. Again, he was described as white. It was three weeks before police apprehended John …
