Don’t know. Too vague to answer.
The question remains-Does the type of profiling that is described in the OP work as is described by its proponents, or is it a bunch of cold-reading hooey, puffery and propaganda? I can see why the FBI promotes the use of its profilers-Good PR is good PR and all that.
The greater point is that you were making a false analogy.
That’s fine. Here, too, we can agree to disagree; I think my analogy is self-evidently on point, and I’ll let readers of this exchange draw whatever conclusions they will.
Here is an extensive look at the history, use and usefulness of profiling by Damon Muller at the University of Melbourne(warning-pdf file).
Wow.
From your cite:
That sure sounds familiar. Well, needless to say, your cite is very convincing, and I unreservedly adopt its findings.
Here is more on the subject by Jon Ronson of the U.K. Guardian. Same conclusions as most of the other links in this thread.
Can anyone point out what bit of trickery Bricker is engaging here?
So you would agree that
?
And Tom Scud gets it in one.
Sounds like bluster to me. We still haven’t established that it provides information. In fact, I would say that it certainly does not. Even if you want to accept that it provides some guidlines for statistical probabilities, those statistics have no investigative utility when you go from the general to the specific.
There seems to be some confusion between criminal profiling and forensic psychology. Criminal profiling is not a field of psychology, and forensic psychologists and psychiatrists do not typically make psychological profiles of “unsubs” to help law enforcement catch criminals. In a criminal setting, forensic psychologists and psychiatrists typically evaluate individuals after arrest to answer legal questions and testify in court regarding the person’s sanity, competency to stand trial, future dangerousness, rates of recidivism, and so on. There’s nothing bunk about this - DSM diagnoses directly bear on competence and sanity, and if you have an individual who has sexually offended against several prepubescent males in public and is psychopathic, that person can be statistically shown to be in a group that reoffends at higher rates than, say, nonpsychopathic incest offenders who offended against a female in private. Forensic psychologists and forensic psychiatrists are simply expert witnesses who are familiar with both legal standards and psychological and medical principles, and who use that knowledge to aid a jury in decisionmaking.
Criminal profiling is a wholly different animal and is more the province of law enforcement officers than of psychologists, but it’s not completely useless - it’s as simple as a homicide detective concluding that a murder victim probably knew their killer because there’s no sign of forced entry or protracted struggle, and because most victims do. An example: in 1978, FBI agent Robert Ressler observed a bizarre, gruesome murder scene of a mutilated pregnant woman and made this profile of the killer:
“White male aged twenty-five to twenty-seven; thin, undernourished appearance; single; living alone in a location within one mile of abandoned station wagon owned by one of the victims. Residence will be extremely slovenly and unkempt, and evidence of the crimes will be found at the residence. Suspect will have a history of mental illness and use of drugs. Suspect will be an unemployed loner who does not associate with either males or females and will probably spend a great deal of time in his own residence. If he resides with anyone, it will be with his parents. However, this is unlikely. Suspect will have no prior military history; will be a high school or college dropout; probably suffers from one or more forms of paranoid psychosis.”
This turned out to be a pretty accurate description of Richard Chase, “the Vampire of Sacramento.” The profile was based on simple observations that the crime scene was evidence of an extremely disordered and psychotic person who made no effort whatsoever to conceal evidence in even the simplest manner, like wiping up bloody fingerprints and shoeprints, or even closing the front door of the house so the body couldn’t be seen from the street. A person like that probably has been hospitalized, doesn’t have very good personal hygene or nutrition, can’t stay in school or hold down a job, and has alienated both family and friends. They knew he probably lived nearby because he walked there and stole a car when he left, and they knew he probably had evidence in his house because he took body parts with him and didn’t seem concerned with being caught. This very easily could have been wrong - the killer could have turned out to have been the bank president, but it was a pretty good educated guess based on the evidence they knew. That’s all profiling is, guesses which occasionally turn out to be pretty good in retrospect.
And the profile had nothing to do with catching the killer. it’s just post-hoc confirmation bias. Sure, sometimes they guess right, but that’s not really of any utility.
The Mad Bomber of the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s closely matched his criminal profile. Pretty good profiling, but it had nothing to do with catching him. The profile predicted he had a grudge against Con Edison, since he planted several bombs in their facilities, but he was actually caught through good old fashioned police work. The man had sent several threatening letters to Con Ed, and a detective using old fashioned investigative techniques went through all of Con Ed’s archived complaint mail to find the guy.
Profiling is guessing, and comes from the Sherlock Holmes school of detection. Something that works in fiction, and fails continuously in real life, often leading to innocent parties being charged or even convicted of crimes. If you find a cigar butt at a crime scene it may have DNA evidence on it, or if it’s not a common make it might even provide a lead to a suspect, but the supposition that a suspect has an oral fixation is not going to help solve a crime.
The profile may have helped to some degree. A former classmate had a disturbing conversation with a grimy and disheveled Chase a few days later and told police, who ran a background check. They discovered that he had a history of mental illness and had once escaped from a mental hospital, he had been arrested for drugs, and lived close by. The profile wasn’t solely responsible for locating a killer, but I doubt you’ll ever find a case like that - you can’t arrest someone based solely on a profile. At any rate, it shows that criminal profiling doesn’t necessarily have to be outright lies and sham on the same level as cold reading - it can be based on common sense observations of evidence.
Sure… as long as we post the complete quote:
Completely agree.
You keep pointing to these things as if they support your premise. I don’t follow, since I thought you were arguing that there was some evidence for the utility of criminal profiling. Your most recent quote says that there is no such evidence and that it is akin to psychic visions, which is the position I thought Diogenes was arguing, in opposition to yours.
So what is it?
That’s not what the quote says. The quote says that IF there is no theoretical and empirical basis on which to build a profile of an offender,we may as well just base it on psychic visions. It doesn’t say that DEFINITIVELY, THERE NEVER ARE theoretical and empirical basis on which to build a profile of an offender.
And as the earlier quote I posted shows, the author agrees that there are:
Indeed, the author refers to the precise study that I had already mentioned before this current piece was linked to.
Yeah, I don’t think the author is equating profiling with psychics. I think he’s saying that profiling may have some validity but is still a long way from being any kind of rigorous discipline, which is a completely fair comment. He actually takes care to distinguish profiling and psychics:
She told police not because of the profile, but because he matched a composite sketch of the suspect that people had seen driving away in a victim’s stolen car. The profile had nothing to do with it.