Offender profiling: the Bottom-up Approach / Geographical Profiling - Forensic Psychology

GEOGRAPHICAL PROFILING:

A01:

This geographical approach to offender profiling was developed by Rossmo (1997) – it involves generalising from the locations of linked crime scenes to the likely home or operational base of the offender.

The basic assumption is that offenders prefer to operate in areas they know well – either close to their home, or places that they visit regularly.

Canter and Gregory (1994) found that many offenders have a crime range as little as 2 miles.

For example: In the case of the Yorkshire Ripper (who attacked and murdered several female victims in the Leeds area in the 1970’s), investigators were able to determine roughly where he lived by studying the location of his crimes.

A03:

Lundrigan and Canter (2001) gathered information from 120 solved murder cases, committed by serial killers, and analysed distances between the offender’s home location and their body disposal site. They found that the offender’s home tended to be geographically central in relation to their crimes. This therefore is a strength of Geographical Profiling as it suggests that it is a very useful tool which contributes towards finding criminals, and therefore is an effective and credible approach.

A further strength of such approach is that it can be used for all types of crimes – unlike the top-down approach which can only be used for the most serious types (eg. murder). Goodwin and Alison (2006) analysed 215 house burglaries and found that Geographical Information was more useful than information about the timing/crime scene/offender characteristics in identifying the perpetrator – this provides strong support for the use of geographical profiling and increases the credibility of such approach.

However, whilst location of a crime is important in identifying the offender, there are other considerations that must be made – such as the time of the crime and the offenders psychological characteristics – therefore, the geographical approach is a useful tool but it only concentrates on location and thus, needs to be used in combination with other methods.