The criminal world grows every day and at the same time, the powers which are aimed to fight with it also do not stay aside. More and more new techniques are investigated every day in order to optimize the work of powerful forces and to increase the rate of caught criminals. Criminal profiling is a technique that helps to analyze the crime committed and to create an opinion about the criminal. This technique is aimed to help police to follow the criminals’ actions and to guess the next criminals’ steps. There are two points of view about criminal profiling. Some people consider it as junk science, as there is no empirical evidence there, the others view it as a solid emerging scientific technique, which is very valuable in the world of criminal investigations.
Investigating the readings on the problem it was pointed out that most of the scholars come to the conclusion that criminal profiling is “conceptually old” (Kocsis & Palermo, 2006, p. 2). In other words, they consider the idea of criminal profiling rather valuable, but a lot of changes should be provided. The notion of criminal profiling was created many years ago. It may be seen in Arthur Conan Doyle’s works and other notable policemen in the XVIII-XIX centuries. The fundamental concept of criminal profiling remained unchanged till our time and is considered to be “remarkably old” (Kocsis & Palermo, 2006, p. 6). Criminal profiling is difficult to consider universally, but still, Kocsis (2007) defines it as the “application of psychological theory and behavioral evidence analysis” (p. 62).
The first problem is that criminal profiling is a rather secret affair and it is impossible to show lots of facts and methods which are used in order to improve the technique of criminal profiling. Considering the problem of criminal profiling, Tuvey and Baeza (2002) say that the “criminal profiling community must begin to communicate and agree upon the standards, practices, terminology and methods (p. xx). The other problem is the different understanding of diagnostic and treatment tools by criminal profilers. This problem is in close interconnection with the absence of good statistics of errors that appear during the process, and one and the same mistake may be committed several times. And the main problem, which is the reason for criminal profiling being old, is the “lack of objective criterion against which to test a sample of actual profiles” (Tuvey & Baeza, 2002, p. 604). So, it may be seen that the field of criminal profiling is not investigated according to the modern level of technical progress.
So, considering the offered readings we may come to the conclusion that most of the scholars consider the concept of criminal profiling rather old. Criminal profiling is not offered to be rejected, but it should be rearranged. There are a lot of problems that exist in criminal profiling: the absence of good statistics, the repetition of errors, the impossibility to create the common method and the structure of criminal profiling as the information in most cases is secret, so it is impossible to follow the process and find out the errors in order to remove problems. The idea of criminal profiling is good, but the methods which are used do not correspond to the modern world technical conditions, and the opportunity of investigation could give more reasonable answers and could remove the problems in limited terms.
Reference List
Kocsis, R. N (2007). Criminal Profiling: International Theory, Research, and Practice. Humana Press.
Kocsis, R. N. & Palermo, G.B. (2006). Criminal profiling: principles and practice Humana Press.
Turvey, B. E. & Baeza, J. J. (2002). Criminal profiling: an introduction to behavioral evidence analysis. Academic Press.