What Is Criminal Profiling ?

Criminal profiling is NOT what you see on tv shows. The fact is criminal profiling does not involve any super powers or psychic abilities, sorry to dissapoint you.

Brent Turvey defines criminal profiling as a careful examination of physical evidence, victimology and all known facts of the crime to infer offender characteristics using the scientific method.

There are a few criminal profiling techniques that have being used in the past to infer offender characteristics and some of those criminal profiling techniques are used to this day.

There are 2 types of criminal profiling techniques and those are:

Inductive criminal profiling, which involves careful examination of research statistics that are highly relevant to any given crime and use the statistics to infer offender characteristics.

Deductive criminal profiling, mainly endorsed and practiced by Brent. E Turvey is focused on all known facts and physcial evidence and utilization of the scientific method to infer the offender characteristics by deduction.

There are a lot of arguements for both criminal profiling techniques and practitioners of inductive and deductive criminal profiling techniques will all claim that their methods work better than others.

A study by Claire Ferguson in to investigative relevance of all known inductive and deductive methods has concluded that inductive methods of criminal profiling offer too many offender characteristics that are not investigatively relevant and are of no use to the investigators.

Ferguson found that only 6 offender characteristics that could be offered in a criminal profile are investigatively relevant, while inductive methods of criminal profiling offered more than 15 on average with some offering up to 40 offender characteristics.

Ferguson's study found that on average Behavioural Evidence Analysis (Deductive criminal profiling method practiced by Brent Turvey) offered 6-8 offender characteristics and therefore was found to be most investigatively relevant method of criminal profiling.

If you would like to learn more about criminal profiling from Brent Turvey then I highly recommend buying his Criminal Profiling 3rd Edition book here... It is in my opinion by far the best criminal profiling book to educate you about deductive criminal profiling method and criminal profiling in general.

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Other Recommended Criminal Profiling & Criminology Books:

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