Offender Profiling

Profiling an offender means analyzing the crime and the victim in order to predict things about the offender's characteristics or whereabouts. The profiler tries to understand what the offender is like, how they think and feel, what motives they have for committing crime, and which strategies they use while carrying it out.

Crime linkage

An important assumption underlying all offender profiling is behavioral consistency, that is, that a person behaves in a similar way in similar situations and that offenders therefore show recurring patterns in their behavior. These patterns are what is used in crime linkage. Crime linkage connects different crime scenes to each other based on shared factors, linking the crimes to one offender or group. This is very important in law enforcement, because the majority of all crimes committed are in fact committed by only a few offenders. When crimes can be linked to each other, investigators get evidence from several crime scenes to work with, public money is saved because the crimes can be investigated jointly, and it becomes possible to carry out offender profiling or geographic profiling.

Crimes can be linked through physical evidence such as DNA traces, but also by looking at the offender's crime scene behavior. The latter is more difficult and more uncertain, however, since similarities in method can also arise from similar situations and need not be caused by the same offender.

Different types of offender profiling

Offender profiling is a method often seen in films and on television, but in reality it is far more difficult, requires far more patience, and is far more uncertain than popular media suggest.

A distinction is usually made between deductive profiling, which draws conclusions about the offender based on facts and evidence from the individual case, and inductive profiling, where predictions about the offender are based on statistical knowledge from previously solved crimes.

There is also something called geographic profiling, where the aim is to predict where the offender lives and moves.

In Sweden there is a dedicated offender profiling group that assists local police with particularly complicated investigations. The group does not run investigations of its own but supports police around the country when needed. It consists of police officers, forensic technicians, behavioral scientists, forensic psychiatrists, and forensic pathologists, which gives it broad interdisciplinary expertise.