Offender Profiling: An Introduction to the Sociopsychological Analysis
of Violent Crime
by George B. Palermo, M.D., and Richard N. Kocsis, Ph.D. Springfield,
Ill.,
Charles C Thomas Publishers, 2004, 284 pp, $56.95 (hard), $38.95 (paper)
Humans
have always had a fascination with the concept of profiling criminals.
At once both exciting and controversial, the profiling of criminal minds
has entered our collective consciousness by routes as disparate as the
heightened airport security following 9/11 and, more innocuously, the
content of popular programs such as CSI. In fact, history
is full of examples that attest to the intriguing nature of profiling.
It is fitting, then, that the beginning of Offender Profiling is
peppered with literary and historical allusions that reflect the subject's
long-standing cultural significance. The introduction by Ralph Slovenko,
the series editor, is alone worth the price of the book. Slovenko carefully
distinguishes between indiscriminate profiling, which is all too often
founded on stereotypes and prejudices, and crime scene perpetrator profiling
founded on behavioral science and decision-making rules of thumb. The
latter are more in the tradition of the best of the DSM-IV rules of thumb:
e.g. "Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart" [1].
The authors note that despite such interest in profiling methods, there
is a surprising lack of scientific evidence with which to assess its
validity, and they argue for the need to place profiling into a theoretical
model in order to justify its purported effectiveness. The scope of the
book thus includes both an examination of the theory and practice of
profiling as well as an evaluation of its most commonly used forms. Part
I of the book examines the psychosocial substrate of criminal profiling.
This includes psychological testing, psychopathologic typologies in literature,
and areas of personality development relevant to crime. Following this,
the authors review the psychological features common in violent criminals.
This entails a discussion of personality traits such as impulsivity,
frustration, sadism, and aggressiveness, and an overview of both personality
and psychotic disorders. Next, the authors discuss socio-criminological
perspectives on violent criminals, including both theories of criminality
and offender typologies. They round out this section with a brief overview
of violent crimes and criminals, offering epidemiological data that is
used to construct various models of offender typologies.
The authors devote the second part of the book to the crime scene. They
begin by describing the methodology of crime scene investigators, which
sets the framework for an examination of crime scene "staging" by
criminals that seek to escape detection. This allows the authors to make
a strong case for the notion that the attributes of a crime scene, staged
or not, can yield valuable information regarding the possible motivations
of criminals, and is integral to the profiling process. The final part
of the book details the main approaches to profiling used today. The
merits of profiling techniques such as "Criminal Investigative
Analysis," "Investigative Psychology,"
and "Crime Action Profiling" are discussed here. Importantly,
the authors do not hesitate from scrutinizing the evidence concerning
each technique's efficacy, and quite often the results suggest that there
is minimal serious scientific research with regard to profiling. The
authors conclude that if profiling is to gain greater acceptance among
the scientific community, those practicing it must be willing to more
rigorously assess its value in an evidence-based sense.
Overall, Offender Profiling offers a thorough, easy-to-read
introduction to the art of profiling. The authors themselves concede
that this vocation is indeed something of an art, as it has yet to be
truly integrated into a theoretical model and tested in research trials.
Despite this, profiling is used widely, and its status as a legitimate
practice is largely undisputed, warranting a close study. Additionally,
profiling methods offer us further insight into how to understand such
fundamental themes in psychiatry as the classification of human behaviors
and motives. Thus, one does not have to be a forensic psychiatrist to
enjoy and learn from what the authors have so thoughtfully composed here,
as students of decision making in psychiatry would do worse than not
only to read Sherlock Holmes but also the work of his modern successors.
For the uninitiated, then, this book recaps both the origins of profiling
and provides an objective overview of the most important recent developments
in this always intriguing and always provocative field.
We hope that the authors' next book will address the
"blind-spots of profilers." For example, the most common reason
why profilers fail is that they cannot imagine the unimaginable. The
Russian profilers who failed to imagine that a good, upstanding member
of the Communist Party could be a serial killer exhibited the common
pitfall of a failure of availability primarily due to anchoring the profile
on an initial impression. Whereas the clinical dictum of "if one
hears hoof beats don't think of Zebras" is apt in conventional settings,
one need only travel to the "jungle" that comprises the bizarre
minds of serious killers to understand how a simple heuristic that can
make us smart can also make us blind [2].
References
-
Gerd G, Todd PM, ABC Research Group: Simple
Heuristics That Make Us Smart. New York, Oxford University Press,
2000
-
Bursztajn H, Feinbloom RI, Hamm RM, Brodsky
A: Medical Choices, Medical Chances: How Patients, Families, and
Physicians Can Cope With Uncertainty. Oxford, UK, Routledge, 1991
ABILASH GOPAL, B.A.
HAROLD BURSZTAJN, M.D.
Boston, Mass.