NCJ Number
119455
Journal
Law and Order Volume: 37 Issue: 7 Dated: (July 1989) Pages: 62-65
Date Published
1989
Length
4 pages
Annotation
The basic premise of criminal profiling is that certain types of people characteristically perform certain acts, making it possible to identify offender characteristics in relation to the type of crime committed.
Abstract
A statistical approach to criminal profiling devised by the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program involves the detailed study of many crime scenes and perpetrators to link offender characteristics with crime scene features. A computer-assisted program developed by a private firm is designed to make criminal profiling easy to use by police investigators without special training in either computers or profiling techniques. The program consists of three discs, one each for sexually related homicide, rape, and occult crimes. Instructions accompanying the program are clear and logical. Although criminal profiling in general provides a possible description of a suspect, yielding probable age, sex, educational, socioeconomic, and personality features that narrow the focus of an investigation, it does not provide the name of a suspect or yield evidence for use in court. For small police departments with limited budgets, computerized criminal profiling represents a cost-effective technique.