ID JonBenet-An American Murder Mystery Part 3 fbi profiling and Mr Cruel

Now comes a group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool who conclude that FBI profiling of criminals is little more than cold reading and subjective validation at work. This was apparent to many people about ten years ago when Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, was caught and the profile was matched to the man. The FBI said the Unabomber would be in his late 30's or early 40's. Kaczynski was 53 when caught. The profile was correct in predicting a white male, though this doesn't seem like a tough trait to guess. The FBI said he'd be 5'10" to 6' tall, 165 pounds, with reddish-blond hair, a thin mustache, and a ruddy complexion. Kaczynski was 5'8", weighed 143 pounds, had brown hair, pale skin, and was bearded. The profile predicted he would be a blue collar worker with a high school degree. Kaczynski hadn't had a job in 25 years and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in addition to being a graduate of Harvard University. The FBI profile predicted the Unabomber would be a meticulously organized person, reclusive and having problems dealing with women. Kaczynski was a recluse (again, not a tough call) who apparently did not deal with women at all, but he was slovenly and unkempt. The FBI profile was wrong about almost everything regarding a man they'd been tracking for years.

The Liverpool psychologists argue that profiling won't work the way the FBI does it. (FBI profiling assumes a stable relationship between configurations of offense behaviors and background characteristics, which is not supported by the research evidence.) Second, they note that the FBI claims a high degree of accuracy for the method that supposedly shouldn't work. Then, they explain the illusion of accuracy as due to subjective validation. The whole sordid story is detailed in Malcom Gladwell's recent article in the New Yorker, "Dangerous Minds - criminal profiling made easy."

According to Gladwell, the psychologists tested the FBI's profile of serial sex-offender killers, who the profilers divide into two types based on their level of organization.

First, they [the psychologists] made a list of crime-scene characteristics generally considered to show organization: perhaps the victim was alive during the sex acts, or the body was posed in a certain way, or the murder weapon was missing, or the body was concealed, or torture and restraints were involved. Then they made a list of characteristics showing disorganization: perhaps the victim was beaten, the body was left in an isolated spot, the victim’s belongings were scattered, or the murder weapon was improvised.

If the FBI was right, they reasoned, the crime-scene details on each of those two lists should “co-occur”—that is, if you see one or more organized traits in a crime, there should be a reasonably high probability of seeing other organized traits. When they looked at a sample of a hundred serial crimes, however, they couldn’t find any support for the FBI’s distinction. Crimes don’t fall into one camp or the other. It turns out that they’re almost always a mixture of a few key organized traits and a random array of disorganized traits.*

It also turns out that it shouldn't be surprising that the profile is bogus. It wasn't based on a representative sample. According to Gladwell, the FBI profilers who came up with the serial killer profile, John Douglas and Robert Ressler, chatted only with convicts who were in prison in California. Furthermore, they had no standardized protocol for interviewing their subjects. There are other reasons FBI profiles are bound to be inaccurate. I noted some of these in a newsletter five years ago. Even if the profilers got a representative sample of, say, serial rapists, they can never interview the ones they don't catch nor the ones they catch but don't convict. Also, it would be naive to believe that serial rapists or killers are going to be forthright and totally truthful in any interview.

FBI profiles are based on the assumption that there is a pattern where in fact there is none. The assumption is that facts about the crime will match up with facts about the criminal. The Liverpool psychologists tested this hypothesis:

the Liverpool group selected a hundred stranger rapes in the United Kingdom, classifying them according to twenty-eight variables, such as whether a disguise was worn, whether compliments were given, whether there was binding, gagging, or blindfolding, whether there was apologizing or the theft of personal property, and so on. They then looked at whether the patterns in the crimes corresponded to attributes of the criminals—like age, type of employment, ethnicity, level of education, marital status, number of prior convictions, type of prior convictions, and drug use. Were rapists who bind, gag, and blindfold more like one another than they were like rapists who, say, compliment and apologize? The answer is no—not even slightly.*

As one vocal critic of FBI profiling, Brent Turvey, put it: "The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons."* Turvey supports a method of profiling known as Behavioural Evidence Analysis, which is not discussed here or in Gladwell's article. "You’ve got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face," says Turvey. "Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn’t want to see her. It could mean he doesn’t want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can’t just look at one behavior in isolation.”

Does this sound familiar? The same problem exists with the polygraph, a favorite tool of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. The polygraph measures such things as heartbeat, blood pressure, and respiration. The polygraph is not a lie detector because changes in heartbeat, blood pressure, and respiration can be caused by many things. Nervousness, anger, sadness, embarrassment, and fear can all be causal factors in altering one's heart rate, blood pressure, or respiration rate. Having to go to the bathroom can also be causative. There are also a number of medical conditions such as colds, headaches, constipation, or neurological and muscular problems that can cause the physiological changes measured by the polygraph. The claim that an expert can tell when the changes are due to a lie and when they are due to other factors has never been proven. Why do so many people, in and out of law enforcement, believe the polygraph is a lie detector? For the same reason that many believe that profiling is accurate, that their daily horoscope is right on, that their tarot card reader is clairvoyant, that John Edward gets messages from the dead, that graphology can reveal the true character of a person, and that Rush Limbaugh is a national treasure: the belief is rooted in cold reading and subjective validation, and grows in soil fertilized with a lot of confirmation bias and communal reinforcement.

Laurence Alison, one of the leaders of the Liverpool group and the author of The Forensic Psychologist's Casebook: Psychological Profiling and Criminal Investigation, examined one of the FBI's prime exhibits for the validity of their profiling method, the profile of the so-called "rooftop killer." He found, according to Gladwell, that the profile was written in unverifiable, contradictory, and ambiguous language so that "it could support virtually any interpretation."

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Problems

Offender profiling is not without problems or those who say it is invalid. Incorrect information from profiling can lead to false positives or false negatives. Investigators may find a suspect who appears to fit an incorrect profile and ignore or stop investigating other leads. The opposite of the false positive is the false negative: the profile yields incorrect information which would cause investigators to ignore a suspect who is actually guilty.

Some profilers such as Brent Turvey, as quoted by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker[23] have questioned its scientific validity. Many profilers and FBI agents, such as Turvey, are not psychologists, and some researchers who looked at their work found methodological flaws.

Although criminal profiling is quite popular and is often used as a tool in criminal investigations, it lacks empirical evidence to support its use. In a review by Eastwood et al. (2006), existing research on the validity of criminal profiling was analyzed, to determine whether this technique can be counted on to aid in criminal investigations. One of the studies that was noted in the review was by Pinizzotto and Finkel (1990), and involved asking different groups of people, including actual profilers, university students, police detectives, and clinical psychologists, to create a profile based on details about a particular crime. The results showed that the trained criminal profilers did not do any better than the other groups in creating an accurate profile which could predict who the culprit was. Similar results were obtained in another study, which assessed police officers, psychologists, students, psychics, and profilers on their ability to create a predictive profile. Again, results showed that profilers were not significantly better at creating a profile than any of the other groups.[24] From these results, Eastwood et al. concluded that there is no compelling evidence that criminal profilers are more capable of predicting the characteristics and traits of a criminal than those who are not trained in the field. Thus, if criminal profiling cannot be shown to be a valid instrument for narrowing down the suspect pool and potentially targeting a guilty individual, it is questionable whether it should be used in investigations and courtrooms at all.

Besides its validity, other aspects of criminal profiling are problematic as well. Snook et al. (2008) outline several problems with the practice. First, the typologies that are used in criminal profiling have not been empirically shown to be accurate in matching the behavior of criminals. The practice of criminal profiling is based on the psychological theory that underlying dispositions are what make individuals engage in criminal behavior. It is now known that this theory is flawed, but it is still a central component of profiling.

Three psychologists from the Universities of Liverpool and Hull are questioning the basic presumption that one can draw conclusions about a person from a single instance of behaviour under such special circumstances. "The notion that particular configurations of demographic features can be predicted from an assessment of particular configurations of specific behaviors occurring in short-term, highly traumatic situations seems an overly ambitious and unlikely possibility. Thus, until such inferential processes can be reliably verified, such claims should be treated with great caution in investigations and should be entirely excluded from consideration in court."[25]

Critics of the practice of offender profiling have mainly contended that few studies have produced clear, quantifiable, evidence of a link between crime scene actions (A) and offender characteristics (C), a necessary supposition of the A to C paradigm proposed by Canter (1995).[26] However, recent research by Goodwill, Lehmann, Beauregard and Andrei (2014)[27] has revealed compelling evidence of links between clusters of crime scene behaviours and offender characteristics. Goodwill et al. suggest that the failure of some previous research to find such links was based on a failure in those studies to examine offender behaviour as part of a dynamic decision-making process, or action phases of the offence. Their study an "Action Phase Approach to Offender Profiling" sought to identify and model the decision-making (action) phases of an offender based on their choice of behaviour and relate these behaviours to known characteristics of the offender.