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10 Offender Profiling and Crime Linkage
JESSICA WOODHAMS AND MATTHEW TONKIN1
CHAPTER OUTLINE
10.1 INTRODUCTION
10.2 CRIME LINKAGE 10.2.1 Evidence-based Practice
10.2.2 Empirical Evidence
10.2.3 Limitations of the Research on Crime Linkage
10.2.4 Conclusions on Crime Linkage
10.3 OFFENDER PROFILING 10.3.1 Schools of Thought in Offender Profiling
10.3.2 The Assumptions of Offender Profiling
10.3.3 Evaluations of Offender Profiles
10.3.4 Evaluations of the Effectiveness of Offender Profiling
10.3.5 Current Provision of Behavioural Investigative Advice (BIA) in the UK
10.4 SUMMARY
LEARNING OUTCOMES
BY THE END OF THIS CHAPTER, YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO:
Understand the theories underpinning crime linkage and offender profiling
Appreciate the variation in methods that come under the umbrella term of offender profiling
Appreciate the limitations of the research into crime linkage and offender profiling.
10.1 INTRODUCTION
It is a truism in criminology that a minority of offenders commit the majority of crime (Bennett & Davis, 2004, Farrington & West, 1993; Wolfgang, Figlio, & Sellin, 1972). These so-called serial offenders are, therefore, a priority for law enforcement agencies around the world due to the considerable costs they impose on our society, both in human and financial terms. For example, a sample of just 2,093 serial offenders in London cost the taxpayer more than £163 million in a three-year period from 2012 to 2015 (Snelling, 2015). Another reason for focusing investigative efforts on serial offenders is that this offers a potentially cost-effective means of reducing crime because a large number of offences can be cleared up by apprehending just a few of the most prolific offenders in a local area (Karn, 2013). In times of austerity and police budget cuts, a move towards more cost-effective, intelligence-led policing would seem logical.
While physical trace evidence, such as DNA or fingerprints, is one of the most objective ways of identifying serial offenders, such trace evidence is not always left at a crime scene (Davies, 1991) and, even if it is, the time it takes to process such information and the associated financial burden can be significant (Santtila, Junkkila, & Sandnabba, 2005). This raises the following question: in the absence of physical trace evidence, what other evidence from the crime scene exists that could be used to assist in detecting the offender and determining the extent of his/her offending? Offender profiling and crime linkage, the subjects of this chapter, are two psychological procedures that have the potential to assist in this regard.
Before going further it is necessary to consider what we mean by “crime linkage” and “offender profiling”. Crime linkage is “a form of behavioural analysis used to identify crimes committed by the same offender, through their behavioural similarity” (Woodhams, Hollin, & Bull, 2007, p. 233) and sometimes their geographical or temporal proximity. It is also called case linkage, linkage analysis, and comparative case analysis.
Offender profiling is also known by many names, including psychological profiling, criminal profiling, behavioural investigative advice (BIA), investigative profiling, crime scene analysis and criminal investigative advice. Definitions of offender profiling also vary from the relatively narrow definition of deducing an offender’s characteristics from his/her crime scene behaviour (Ainsworth, 2000) to a much broader conception including estimating an offender’s future level of threat, providing the police with advice regarding how to interview a suspect, media advice, veracity assessment, search advice and crime linkage (Alison & Rainbow, 2011). For the sake of clarity, in this chapter the term “offender profiling” refers to the practice of inferring an offender’s characteristics from crime scene behaviour.
10.2 CRIME LINKAGE
Although rarely mentioned in popular dramatisations of forensic psychology, crime linkage is conducted in many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa and New Zealand. It is practiced by police employees, such as crime analysts, behavioural investigative advisors and police officers, as well as by consultants, such as academic psychologists. It aims to identify crimes that have been committed by the same offender, using similarity in offender crime scene behaviour as the basis for this decision. For this to work, offenders must behave in a relatively similar way each time they commit a crime of that type, which is referred to as the offender consistency hypothesis (Canter, 1995). However, it is important to note here that offenders do not have to commit their crimes in a perfectly consistent manner for their crimes to be linked using crime scene behaviour (Bennell, Jones, & Melnyk, 2009). In fact, as long as two crimes committed by the same offender are more consistent than two crimes committed by different offenders, there is support for the underlying assumptions of crime linkage. Thus, it is relative behavioural consistency rather than absolute behavioural consistency that is necessary for crime linkage to work.
As well as needing offenders to be relatively consistent in the way they commit their crimes, it is also necessary that offenders have a degree of distinctiveness in their offending behaviour. For example, if burglars committed their burglaries in exactly the same way, it would not be possible to tell one burglary series from another. This requirement of crime linkage is referred to as behavioural distinctiveness (Woodhams, Hollin et al., 2007) or discrimination (Bennell & Canter, 2002), which assumes that intra-individual behavioural variation will be less than inter-individual behavioural variation (Alison, Bennell, Mokros, & Ormerod, 2002).
Identifying crimes that have been committed by the same serial offender has several advantages, including the efficient deployment of limited police resources and the pooling of witness d
escriptions and physical evidence from different crime scenes (Grubin, Kelly, & Brunsdon, 2001). Some crime types, such as sex offences, are notoriously difficult to prosecute and victim credibility can be pivotal in the successful prosecution of a case (Ellison, 2005). With such cases, crime linkage can help to increase victim credibility because it allows an offender to be charged with multiple offences, thereby meaning there are several victims and each victim can gain credibility from the others (Davies, 1992). While typically used in an investigative context, crime linkage analysis has been presented in legal proceedings in the United States, Australia, the UK, South Africa and New Zealand (e.g. see Case Studies 10.1 and 10.2).
CASE STUDY 10.1 THE NEWCASTLE MURDER SERIES (LABUSCHAGNE, 2006)
From February 2004 to January 2005 in the town of Newcastle in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, two young heterosexual couples were attacked by a lone male offender in the same park whereby the female victims were raped and the male victims murdered. During the same time period, the bodies of two males were also recovered from the same area. There was no DNA evidence linking the four rapes and murders; however, the surviving rape victims from the first two crimes identified the accused during identity parades and the accused confessed his involvement in the murders to a witness, which led to the arrest of Themba Anton Sukude. Evidence of behavioural similarity was used to support charging the accused for the third and fourth murders. Some of the similar and dissimilar behaviours identified by Brigadier Labuschagne in his linkage analysis can be seen in Table 10.1. Labuschagne’s linkage analysis report was used as evidence during the trial and the accused was found guilty of all charges.
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