The question at the heart of ‘profiling’ is “what sorts of people carry out what sorts of actions?”. This course will explore the contributions of psychology to police investigations, notably in the areas of offender profiling and behavioural investigative advice. Traditionally, offender profiling has been the process by which individuals, drawing on their clinical or other professional experience, make judgments about the personality traits or psychodynamics of the perpetrators of crimes. Learners will study the processes of identifying demographic and social descriptors of an offender including personality, based on characteristics of the crime. Much of what passes for offender profiling in practice and as reported in the media, either factual or fictional, has no empirical basis. Distinctions between clinical and actuarial judgements as well as the effectiveness of a systematic scientific approach will be covered.

The course will cover the theory, research and practice of offender profiling and behavioural investigative advice as well as history, critiques, and challenges. Examination of the styles and patterns of criminal action and how these relate to offenders’ psychological and social characteristics, the inference process and profiling equations, criminal consistency, change and development, modus operandi & signature, will be discussed. Learners will familiarise themselves with approaches to inferring offender characteristics covering a range of crimes, models of differentiation (distinctions between criminals and the appropriate ways of modelling these distinctions), consistency behavioural and spatial. Case studies will be utilized for learners to understand the best practices, major pitfalls, and psychological concepts key to this process. How offence locations relate to the lives of offenders and the significance of closeness of the crime locations to key places in the offender’s life, variations in criminality and offender geography and linking crimes to a common offender will also be explored. Lastly, the role of psychologist in the legal process as well as processes of establishing the manner of death (natural, accident, homicide, or suicide) in cases where it cannot be determined, such as psychological autopsy or psycholinguistics (the study of the relationship between linguistic behaviour and psychological processes of the speaker or writer that underlie that behaviour), will be covered.