In order to understand the historical influences underpinning the FBI's approach to criminal profiling in greater detail, you should read the first criminal profiling lense in the series.

Exploring The Criminal Mind: The Origins of Criminal Profiling

In the first of this series I outlined the pioneering criminal profiling work of Dr James A. Brussel. Brussel documented his work in 1968 in his book 'casebook of a crime psychiatrist'. It was read with great interest by Howard Teten a FBI agent who was teaching a course in criminology at the time.

The following extracts are taken from an interview with Teten. They provide a fascinating insight into the FBI's criminal profiling history and approach.

I developed the FBI's original approach to profiling as a lecture course in 1970. The title of the course was Applied Criminology although several instructors later started calling it Psych-crim. This course was based on a concept which I had originally developed while working as a police crime scene specialist. The idea was conceived in about 1961-62. However, it was necessary to test the approach using solved cases for about 7 years and to check with several Psychiatrists to ensure I was on firm ground in terms of the characteristics of the different mental problem areas before I felt it was ready for presentation...I expanded the course by asking that unsolved cases be brought in for use as examples.

During the class, a profile of the offender was developed for one of the cases being utilized and the perpetrator was identified...our new expanded FBI Academy opened in 1972...new units were also formed to provide the needed oversight and organization necessary to ensure all students received the same material and instruction. One of the units formed was the Behavioral Science Unit.

In 1973, after reading Dr. James Brussel's. "Case Book of a Crime Psychiatrist," I visited Dr. Brussel at his home in New York. While he was for all intents and purposes, retired at that time, he was most gracious and was quite willing to discuss his approach to profiling. Over the next year or so I visited him on several occasions examining the similarities and differences in our approaches.

His approach was to seek specific areas of psychiatric potential and then to combine them to form a profile. This was somewhat different from my approach which was to derive an overall impression of the gross mental status based on the crime scene as a whole. We reasoned that his method was more capable of providing detailed information while my approach was less subject to error

Robert Ressler began conducting interviews with convicted serial killers in 1976. After a number of interviews, he was joined in this project by John Douglas who had joined the BSU in early 1976. This project was able to provide a significant amount of information in terms of why and how certain characteristics were found at the crime scenes.

The data from these interviews were particularly valuable in that the information allowed even those profilers who had not conducted a large number of crime scene analyses to be effective in evaluating the psychological impressions at a crime scene.

I've highlighted Teten's last comment in bold because it reveals the essential purpose of criminal profiling, namely generating a behavioural composite of an unknown offender so that it tells you something about the personality of the individual.

How you develop this composite can differ but the end result is the same i.e. establishing an informed sense of the type of person who has committed the crime.

And this should be obvious from the following definitions.

An educated attempt to provide specific information about a certain type of suspect (Geberth, 1981).

A biographical sketch of behavioral patterns, trends and tendencies' (Vorpagel, 1982).

Profilers have been able to develop typologies, understand the link between crime scenes and the characteristics of offenders, and develop information that is useful in violent crime investigations' (Hinman 2002).

Having established that the primary aim of criminal profiling is to reveal the behavioural make-up of an unknown offender, the next criminal profiling lense in the series will examine how supporters of criminal profiling claim this is possible.

For free and comprehensive information from the world of forensic psychology and forensic science visit the main websites.

www.all-about-forensic-psychology.com

www.all-about-forensic-science.com

The more I learn about Squidoo, the more I like it. So much so, I have dedicated a whole page to Squidoo on my forensic science website. The page explains what Squidoo is all about, why you should start building your own Squidoo pages and if you already are, how you can get the most out of Squidoo.

Click Here To Learn More About Squidoo