What is Criminal Profiling?
Dumb question. It’s that thing Mulder did before he started on the X-Files. Well, there’s a little more to it than that… Criminal profiling, or as it is sometimes called, offender profiling, or behavioral profiling, is an investigative technique used to identify the offender in a crime. Here’s a good definition given by Howard Teten: “Offender profiling is a method of identifying the perpetrator of a crime based on an analysis of the nature of the offense and the manner in which it was committed. Various aspects of the criminal’s personality makeup are determined from his or her choice of actions before, during, and after the crime. This information is combined with other pertinent details and physical evidence, and then compared with the characteristics of known personality types and mental abnormalities to develop a practical working description of the offender.” The final product of criminal profiling is a profile, which is used by law enforcement to catch the perpetrator. • What
