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Post by Joanna on May 21, 2017 3:34:09 GMT -5
Criminal Profiling: Scientific Tool or Psychobabble?“... somewhere between hard forensic science and Hollywood-cop psychobabble, criminal profiling struggles to find a legitimate place in law enforcement’s investigative toolbox.” – Laurence Miller, The Skeptical Inquirer, January-February 2015.
Here’s a common television drama scenario: a body has been discovered in a neighborhood and it seems to match a pattern of previous homicides. “Looks like a serial killer,” mutters one beat cop to another. “Better call in [your favorite TV detective’s name here].” Cue the somber, yet wistfully hopeful, music as the experienced criminal profiler enters the frame and scopes out the crime scene, analyzes the evidence, interviews witnesses and ultimately develops a behavioral profile that leads to the killer’s capture and conviction. Everybody has seen stories like this, but what is their basis in reality? Is criminal profiling a valid law enforcement tool or a fictional forensic fad?
Information from books, TV shows, movies and the media’s general fascination with the dark side of human behavior have all combined to produce an explosion of interest in the field of criminal profiling over the past decade. In academia, too, a growing number of master’s and doctoral programs are allowing students to do research and dissertations in this area. Behavioral profiling research is being accepted for publication in many prominent psychology and criminal justice journals, and the field has spawned at least one periodical entirely devoted to this topic, The Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling.
However, a number of forensic skeptics have expressed concern that the popularity and enthusiastic application of what variously has been termed behavioral profiling, psychological profiling, offender profiling, or criminal profiling have far exceeded the evidence for its scientific validity. This article provides a concise description of the practice of criminal profiling, addresses the questions of both its theoretical validity and practical utility, and makes some recommendations for how to rationally and usefully integrate the art and practice of criminal profiling into the fields of scientific psychology and criminal justice.
Criminal Profiling: What Is It? All professionals who work with human beings, whether medical doctors, psychologists, business managers, or police detectives, do some sort of profiling in their daily work. Understanding both the commonalities and differences in human behavior enables these professionals to individually tailor their services to people of diverse types. Clinicians need to know how different patients will respond to different medical procedures or forms of psychotherapy. Law enforcement officers need to know how different suspects will behave under varying circumstances.
Although various terms and definitions have been proposed, the term behavioral profiling is generally understood to refer to “a technique for identifying the major personality and behavioral characteristics of an individual based upon an analysis of the crimes he or she has committed.” Thus, the basic idea is that certain personality types express themselves by the individualized way they commit a crime, and that analyzing the particular pattern can provide clues to the killer’s identity.
While some form of profiling has always been a part of criminal investigation, efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to develop and implement a formal and systematic process for crime scene profiling began only as recently as 1978, with the formation of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, or BSU, which evolved into the Profiling and Behavioral Assessment Unit. Initially, the process was developed specifically to deal with cases of serial homicide and serial rape. Although the official FBI term for this activity is criminal investigative analysis, the more colloquial term “criminal profiling” has become entrenched in both the academic and popular literature. With some slight differences in approach, profiling has also become popular in Canada, Great Britain and the Netherlands.
Despite the emphasis on psychology, however, profilers as a group have not articulated a uniform theory of human behavior that guides their investigations, and it is often unclear as to whether they are trying to reconstruct the personality of a given offender or merely generating a loosely connected series of psychologically descriptive statements concerning the interpersonal style and the underlying motives of the suspect.
Working the Case: How Profiles Are Developed. The FBI’s model of criminal profiling typically follows a sequence of stages:
Preliminary steps. The first officer who discovers the crime scene endeavors to preserve the scene and, if possible, hold any witnesses or suspects for questioning. The on-scene officer initiates a log or timeline that accounts for all activities at the scene and the people and vehicles that have had access to the area. The on-scene officer then contacts the special investigator, or “profiler.”
Initial procedures. The investigator first assesses the area as a whole to take in the “big picture” – neighborhood, roadways, pedestrian pathways – before focusing on the crime scene itself. In an initial survey, or “walk-through,” of the scene, the investigator takes notes, photos and videos for later processing and ascertains whether there is any fragile or perishable evidence that needs to be collected and preserved right away.
Describing the scene. The investigator records a complete description of the victim and the surrounding area, including: age, sex, body type, skin and hair coloring, clothing or missing clothing, positioning and location of the body, obvious or unusual weapons in the vicinity, obvious signs of violence such as bullet holes, shell casings, blood stains, bottles, or syringes, evidence of premortem injury or postmortem mutilation, and any other evidence that could yield clues as to cause of death. At some point, physical evidence is collected from the crime scene, either by a special evidence collection team (in larger police agencies) or the investigator him/herself (in smaller departments).
An important aspect of on-scene homicide investigation is an analysis of crime scene staging, in which the offender manipulates the crime scene in an attempt to confuse or misdirect law enforcement investigators from the true cause of death or motive for the killing. Common scenarios include revenge homicides staged to look like suicides or accidents, domestic homicides staged to look like robberies, or sexual homicides staged to shock or taunt police and the media. In such cases, the investigator considers who would benefit from the scene being staged or what psychological gratification might be obtained by the perpetrator.
Forensic interviews. Any potential witnesses are interviewed at the scene to take advantage of their fresh observations and recollections. Some witnesses may be transported to the department for further questioning. Follow-up interviews may be scheduled at later dates as more evidence comes in.
Victimology. A thorough understanding of who the victim is, where he or she lived and worked, his or her background and social relationships are often viewed by profilers as a vital first step in ascertaining why he/she was victimized, who the killer was, and what may be his/her preferred type victim. Types of victim information include injuries sustained (methodical execution or violently rageful attack?), location of the victim (what was he or she doing away from work in the middle of the afternoon?), victim’s occupation (what type people would he/she likely run into?), family and friends (recent romantic breakup or harassment by creepy neighbor or workmate?) and legal history (clean-cut preppie found in “druggie” neighborhood?). This information is combined to develop the victim profile, which in turn is supposed to yield clues to the offender’s modus operandi (MO) that is, his/her particular and individualized methodology of committing crimes (this is distinguished from the signature, which reflects the offender’s deliberate manipulation of the crime scene).
Developing the offender profile. When all this data has been collected, the FBI’s Crime Scene Analysis consists of six steps: (1) inputting the profiling data; (2) developing decision process models to discern patterns and commonalities; (3) reconstructing the crime scenario, i.e., exactly how the suspect killed the victim; (4) construction of a criminal profile that incorporates the motives, physical qualities, personality, and behavioral tendencies of the perpetrator; (5) targeted investigation of a narrowed pool of suspects who fit the profile and use of the profile in interviewing and interrogating likely suspects; and (6) apprehension of the offender. This process strives to be cyclical and flexible so the profile may be modified as new information comes in from ensuing investigations. Note the overall rationale of the FBI’s criminal profiling approach is not to identify airtight, idiosyncratic markers that can zero in on a single specific perpetrator, but to develop a suite of identifying characteristics that can be compared to other offenders already in the database. If the suspect is previously unknown to law enforcement, there will be nothing with which to compare the profile. The preternatural discernment and apprehension of a previously unknown suspect living down the street is something that happens in Hollywood, not in real-life law enforcement.
But Does it Work? Evidence for the Validity and Usefulness of Criminal Profiling. Even within the limits described, there are quite a number of cases where criminal profiles have proven to be inaccurate, unhelpful or frankly misleading in solving crimes. This has led the pendulum of opinion to swing in the other direction, with some critics asserting that behavioral profiling is little better than astrology, while others take a more middle ground position in the debate over whether behavioral profiling is mainly a highly skilled art or should aspire to be a replicable, scientific technique – in essence, the same debate that surrounds almost every area of applied psychology, including forensic psychology.
One problem is that most research and writing on psychological profiling has not been by psychologists, but by law enforcement investigators, who tend to take an intuitive case-study approach rather than a skeptical orientation toward their subject. Over the past two decades, a number of forensic psychologists have attempted to examine the empirical basis for criminal behavioral profiling.
Law enforcement investigators and profiling. In an early study, Anthony Pinizzotto surveyed local law enforcement officers who had asked the FBI’s BSU to develop a total of 196 offender profiles to assist in their investigations. Most of the officers reported that the profiles were of some use in focusing their investigation, but less than half considered the profiles to be significantly helpful in solving their cases, and in only 17 percent of cases did the profiles lead to the actual identification of a suspect.
A subsequent study presented a previously solved murder case and rape case, in which the outcome was already known, to five different groups: (1) “expert profilers” (i.e., instructors in the FBI’s BSU); (2) “trained profilers” (law enforcement investigators who had undergone training from the BSU); (3) police detectives with no formal training in profiling; (4) psychologists; and (5) university students. The expert and trained profilers wrote longer and more detailed offender profiles and their profiles were ranked higher in overall usefulness by an independent panel of detectives. However, the profiles of the expert and trained profilers were actually the least useful in predicting the actual characteristics of the murderer, although they did somewhat better than the other groups in predicting the rapist’s characteristics.
Psychologists and profiling. What do psychologists think about psychological profiling? Curt Bartol found that 70 percent of a large sample of self-identified police psychologists seriously questioned the validity and usefulness of criminal profiling. However, in another study, simply changing the nomenclature from criminal profiling to criminal investigative analysis yielded a sharp increase in perceived scientific validity among surveyed psychologists. Although the authors did not address this, I think the term profiling has accreted an unfortunate burden of prejudice, as it has been used pejoratively to describe unwarranted stigmatization of certain demographic groups, and this attribution may be unfairly tainting the term in other contexts as well.
Whatever the name, even if psychologists could overcome their skepticism, might their unique training and knowledge about the human mind confer some advantage in creating a profile? Richard Kocsis and colleagues directly compared the profiling skills of psychologists to that of police officers and found the only significant differences were that psychologists more accurately predicted the offender’s physical features and offense behaviors. In fairness, however, should psychologists who do not specialize in forensic analysis be expected to have any special skills in this area based on their general knowledge of human behavior? For that matter, should police officers who are not trained profilers be assumed to have such specialized abilities just by virtue of working in a law enforcement field?
Craig Bennell and colleagues mince no words in categorically rejecting the idea that psychologists have any special insight into the criminal mind or any special skills with regard to criminal profiling. They point out that in other forensic contexts, such as psychological evaluations for the courts, psychologists typically show marked disagreement with one another and specialized training seems to have no appreciable effect on the accuracy or usefulness of their reports. This, however, may be generalizing from a few sensationalized “battles of the experts” that receive glaring media attention and are dramatized on TV cop-and-lawyer shows. In my experience as a forensic examiner, if provided with sufficient background data and a comprehensive clinical interview, it is rare for truly honest and objective evaluators to come up with diametrically opposed conclusions in forensic evaluations. Examiners may disagree on the precise diagnosis (schizophrenia vs. schizoaffective or bipolar disorder) or the exact relationship of the clinical criteria to the legal standard (subject was paranoid at the time of the offense but was able to control his actions vs. subject was powerless to disobey command hallucinations). However, most evaluations of the same subject will yield a rough consensus because the examiners are using well-validated principles of psychological investigation combined with their own knowledge and experience to produce a credible assessment. The same probably applies to skilled criminal profilers: of course they’re not always right, and different profilers may disagree on assorted details, but it would be surprising if, given the same data and using the same methods, they came up with widely diverging profiles, especially on a consistent basis.
Criminal Profiling: Where Are We? At present, the evidence for the overall validity of criminal profiles in solving serial homicides and other crimes appears weaker than at first suggested by the initial flush of enthusiasm. Probably, this represents expected growing pains in the maturation of any behavioral science, and criminal behavioral profiling will no doubt ultimately be found to occupy a middle ground somewhere between infallibility and psychobabble. In the meantime, practitioners out in the real world must competently, ethically, and carefully use the available skills and tools, psychological and technological, to try to solve actual cases.
Certainly, in the investigation of crimes of all types, psychological profiling should never be relied upon to the exclusion of traditional evidence collection and analysis, and it should be regarded as one piece of the puzzle that can occasionally yield useful information. Again, the tension between art and science in all fields of applied human behavior, especially in forensic psychology, is one that must be dealt with forthrightly if our professional credibility is to be maintained.Source: Ralph Davis, LinkedIn, June 13, 2016.
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Post by jason on May 21, 2017 22:44:41 GMT -5
I can answer this question: Psychobabble! There was a serial killer in Baton Rouge back in the 90s and members of my criminal law class at Loyola went to a presentation by Ann Rule, the author, and some FBI profiler. During the presentation, the profiler said the killer was white, had an unkempt appearance, didn't hold a job very long, lived alone or with parents, had never had a long-term steady relationship with a woman, didn't have a significant criminal history and may have worked in law enforcement at one time.
When Derrick Todd Lee was finally identified by DNA in 2003, he was BLACK, didn't live alone or with parents, was a snazzy dresser, had worked at the same job for years, had a wife and children plus a long-time mistress on the side, had a rap sheet a mile long, and had never worked in law enforcement.
His name came to the attention of police more than once in the early '90s, but wasn't considered because he was black and "didn't fit the profile."
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Post by steve on May 22, 2017 18:55:09 GMT -5
I can answer this question: Psychobabble! There was a serial killer in Baton Rouge back in the 90s and members of my criminal law class at Loyola went to a presentation by Ann Rule, the author, and some FBI profiler. During the presentation, the profiler said the killer was white, lived alone, had an unkempt appearance, didn't hold a job very long, lived alone or with parents, had never had a long-term steady relationship with a woman, didn't have a significant criminal history and may have worked in law enforcement at one time.
When Derrick Todd Lee was finally identified by DNA in 2003, he was BLACK, didn't live alone or with parents, was a snazzy dresser, had worked at the same job for years, had a wife and children plus a long-time mistress on the side, had a rap sheet a mile long, and had never worked in law enforcement.
His name came to the attention of police '90s, but wasn't considered because he was black and "didn't fit the profile." I don't know very much about profiling, but the killers never seem to be anything like what the profilers say -- except on TV.
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Post by Sam on May 22, 2017 20:24:34 GMT -5
I've never found the profiles to be of any help in finding a suspect. Just like happened in the case Jason posted about, they're usually completely wrong. I don't understand why some law enforcement departments waste money and time on profiling.
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Post by catherine on May 23, 2017 17:22:45 GMT -5
It's unreal how many people believe that criminal profiling is a science and actually works. They're the types who believe what they see on TV shows like "Criminal Minds" is factual.
I remember that the profilers said BTK was an articulate younger man, who lived alone, something of a loner, a man known to a local pornography dealer and planned to go into some form of law enforcement. Dennis Rader was middle-age, his written English was atrocious (far from articulate); had a wife and kids; was active in his Church, Cub Scouts and other activities; wasn't going into law enforcement; and had never been in the pornography shop.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 12, 2018 18:45:39 GMT -5
Wow. We got a lot of profiling skeptics here! I got my work cut out for me. Lots to read.
Starting with Dennis Rader: I don't know when the profile was done saying he was young. But he was 29 years old when he started. He was in Home Security and was a Bylaw Enforcement Officer so pretty close to law enforcement.
He was also Air Force but that kind of Indicator wasn't known until after 2010. He was captured in 2005.
Be nice please. I'm in Aviation.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 13, 2018 2:13:27 GMT -5
Derek Todd Lee: According to a thoughco Link, there were two or three serial killers working at the same time in Baton Rouge. Lee operated in different places and some of his victims were black. www.thoughtco.com/derrick-todd-lee-973096More likely a black to go after black and white, same with Washington snipers. And who’s to say they don’t have a white grandparent and are part white like Ali. Although you very seldom hear a profiler say married with kids etcetera. I knew a male prostitute victim of a spree killer and the FBI profiler said unmarried for no reason. The killer was married with a newborn. Police still need to be able to deal with options and other possibilities. And profilers need to get over that guy in his mother’s basement propaganda. That comes from psychology which disparages the field which they influenced.
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Post by jason on Jan 13, 2018 3:10:53 GMT -5
Derek Todd Lee: According to a thoughco Link, there were two or three serial killers working at the same time in Baton Rouge. Lee operated in different places and some of his victims were black. More likely a black to go after black and white, same with Washington snipers. And who’s to say they don’t have a white grandparent and are part white like Ali. Although you very seldom hear a profiler say married with kids etcetera. I knew a male prostitute victim of a spree killer and the FBI profiler said unmarried for no reason. The killer was married with a newborn. Police still need to be able to deal with options and other possibilities. And profilers need to get over that guy in his mother’s basement propaganda. That comes from psychology which disparages the field which they influenced. There are always serial killers operating in Baton Rouge, which has some of the highest murder and other violent crime rates in the country. Basically, Baton Rouge, like New Orleans, is a black hellhole. Derrick Todd Lee's victims were in the Baton Rouge area, two of them on the same street, two others in the same subdivision. He was linked by DNA to only 7 victims and all but one of the 7 were white. Some attribute as many as 17 victims to him. If Lee is part white, it's so far back in his family tree to be inconsequential.
Because the majority of serial killers are white -- which isn't surprising because blacks make up only 13% of the US population -- profilers just aren't willing to admit that blacks can be serial killers and inevitably assume a killer is white, simply because he's a serial killer. They are also so hung up on the theory that serial killers go after a particular "type" of woman (or man) that they ignore the fact that there are killers who don't differentiate because of race, or even gender. There have been several well-known black serial killers, including Carlton Gary, who murdered elderly white women in Georgia back in the 70s. Another is Carl Eugene Watts, "The Sunday Morning Slasher," who typically killed white women, though some of his victims were black. The main reason we seldom hear about black serial killers is because most of them kill black women and the cases aren't usually publicized and even if they are, no one is interested.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 13, 2018 17:11:35 GMT -5
Well, the profiler that gave the presentation you saw wasn't the one who did the initial Derrick Todd Lee Profile which is somewhat more accurate although they still said white.
criminalminds.wikia.com/wiki/Derrick_Todd_Lee
I'll admit that there are non-Caucasians who fall into the spectrum of the non-ethnic, proverbial 'white' criminality like the Grim Sleeper. Lee though seemed to work strictly indoors which isn't what I would call strictly non-ethnic. Obviously there are environmental factors and there are practical considerations that change your natural choice of victim.
Are you saying that profiles have to be specific directives of what to find? Or are you allowed to state your disclaimers? Or is that just covering all your bases?
Law enforcement demands clear cut profiles without reservations and therefore profilers play the odds as best they can. Bet on white. Bet on white!
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Post by jason on Jan 16, 2018 6:22:50 GMT -5
I'll admit that there are non-Caucasians who fall into the spectrum of the non-ethnic, proverbial 'white' criminality like the Grim Sleeper. Lee though seemed to work strictly indoors which isn't what I would call strictly non-ethnic. Obviously there are environmental factors and there are practical considerations that change your natural choice of victim.
Are you saying that profiles have to be specific directives of what to find? Or are you allowed to state your disclaimers? Or is that just covering all your bases?
Law enforcement demands clear cut profiles without reservations and therefore profilers play the odds as best they can. Bet on white. Bet on white! I'm not saying that profiles have to be 100% correct, but by saying "Bet on white," you're admitting it's primarily guesswork. I'm in New Orleans and though I'm not in law enforcement, I studied criminal law at Loyola New Orleans. The Baton Rouge killer operated for such a long time and there were so many stories about what was going on -- some pretty far out -- that it was a case in which I was very much interested, beginning with the murder of Connie Warner in her home in the Oak Shadows subdivision in Zachary (a Baton Rouge suburb) in August 1992.
One rainy night in April 1993, Michelle Chapman and her boyfriend were parked in Azalea Rest Cemetery (which borders on the Oak Shadows subdivision) when they were attacked by a clean-shaven, well-dressed black man with bloodshot eyes wielding a machete-type weapon. He almost cut off one of Chapman's feet. Years later, Chapman was able to pick Lee's picture out of a photo array. Azalea Rest Cemetery is rumored to be haunted and America's Most Wanted emphasized the haunted angle in a late 1990s show about the Baton Rouge killer.
His next known victim was Randi Mebruer, whom he abducted from her home in the Oak Shadows subdivision, just a block from where Connie Warner was murdered. Her body has never been found.
Eugenie Boisfontaine disappeared in June 1997, either from her home on Stanford Avenue or near the lakes on the LSU campus. Her body was found two months later in Bayou Manchac.
In June 1999, Collette Walker of St. Francisville filed stalking charges against Lee after he forced his way into her apartment. For some reason, police didn't connect Lee to the Baton Rouge murders.
The next victim was Gina Green, who was found raped and murdered in her Baton Rouge home in September 2001.
In January 2002, Geralyn Barr DeSoto was found beheaded in her home in Addis.
On May 23, 2002, Christine Moore, who was black, disappeared while jogging in Baton Rouge. Her body was found in a ravine around three weeks later.
A week later, on May 31, 2002, Murray Pace was stabbed to death in her Baton Rouge home located in the same area where Christine Moore had disappeared.
On July 9, 2002, Lee entered the St. Martin Parish home of Dianne Alexander and was beating and attempting to rape her when her son walked in and began fighting him. He got away, but both the woman and her son were able to describe Lee as a black man and the son, who chased Lee, provided a description of the car he was driving. Dianne Alexander survived the attack.
Just three days later, on July 12, 2002, Pamela Kinamore disappeared from her home in the Briarwood Estates subdivision of Baton Rouge. Her body was found four days later under the Whiskey Bay Bridge.
Dené Colomb, also black, was abducted from a cemetery in Grand Coteau in November 2002. Her body was found three days later in Scott, LA.
Lee is also a suspect in the murder of 65-year-old Mary Ann Fowler, who disappeared on Christmas Eve 2002 from a Subway restaurant in Port Allen. His only connection to this murder is that his cell phone pinged off a tower 14 miles from where Fowler vanished. Her body has never been found.
In March 2003, Carrie Lynn Yoder disappeared from her home on Dodson Avenue in Baton Rouge. Her body was found a few days later floating beneath the Whiskey Bay Bridge.
Lee didn't confine his killing to the indoors. He abducted some of his victims and their bodies were found in distant locations, or never found at all. When he took Randi Mebruer from her home, her child was sleeping in the next room.
My problem with profilers in the Lee case is that Michelle Chapman and her boyfriend had both identified their assailant as black way back in 1993. He was also caught breaking into a Zachary home in 1993 and served a year in prison. Another time, the police actually chased Lee after someone reported he was sneaking around their neighborhood. Yet, the profilers were insistent the serial killer stalking the Baton Rouge area was white.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 16, 2018 21:33:07 GMT -5
They're basically still repeating what what said on the Phil Donahue show in the 1970s. Intelligent white male loner 25-30 years old.
The racial profile as white is basically the only racial profiling allowed anywhere in L.E. They are otherwise constrained. Unless the victims are all black, can they even say black?
Strictly speaking, serial killers are thought to seek out victims who are whiter or lighter than them. So the killer would generally be not white but less white. I'm talking about color not race. This site describes it as victims being "more white" or "less black".
opendatascience.com/blog/inside-serial-killer-data-part-one/
I think it's an aesthetic function which often occurs as well in relationship match-ups or a semi-racist one based on shades which can occur with all races or both although you would think they would rather victimize someone the other shade than the one they like for a match-up.
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Post by jason on Jan 17, 2018 3:19:36 GMT -5
They're basically still repeating what what said on the Phil Donahue show in the 1970s. Intelligent white male loner 25-30 years old.
The racial profile as white is basically the only racial profiling allowed anywhere in L.E. They are otherwise constrained. Unless the victims are all black, can they even say black?
Strictly speaking, serial killers are thought to seek out victims who are whiter or lighter than them. So the killer would generally be not white but less white. I'm talking about color not race. This site describes it as victims being "more white" or "less black".
opendatascience.com/blog/inside-serial-killer-data-part-one/
I think it's an aesthetic function which often occurs as well in relationship match-ups or a semi-racist one based on shades which can occur with all races or both although you would think they would rather victimize someone the other shade than the one they like for a match-up.
There's nothing preventing a profiler from saying a serial killer is black if he, or she, thinks he's black. In fact, if a profiler believed a serial killer was black and failed to say so because it wasn't politically-correct, he could find himself on the wrong side of a lawsuit if, after a profile was released, a living victim, or a victim's family, discovered he held back that information.
In the case of Derrick Todd Lee, it was hard-headedness, not political correctness, that led profilers to conclude the perp was white, even when there was evidence suggesting otherwise. They were also hung up on how the man held his flashlight -- up at his shoulder like cops hold flashlights -- and refused to admit that a man who had no connection to law enforcement might hold a flashlight the same way.
According to the link you posted, 39.8% of serial killers are black and 51.9% white. White males make up 31% of the US population. Black males make up around 6% of the population, so black men are more likely to be serial killers than white men. Of course, blacks are more likely to commit crimes in general than white people.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 17, 2018 20:47:22 GMT -5
Their statistics used the wrong definition - two or more killings rather than 3. You need at least three especially if there was a major gap after the second which means he could have stopped before becoming an official serial killer.
I'll accept 20 % black serial killers post-integration with all types of serial killers lumped together. I don't know about pre.
I agree they should have included possible black male or probable black male in their profile.
RE: Propensity of serial killer behavior.
To me, anything higher than 2 x the going rate is an Indicator of a possibility of serial Homicidal nature (not behavior). You might say, oh there's only 6% black men and they're 20 % of all the serial killers. Whites males are 31 % and 52 % of all the serial killers.
Comparatively that 3.3 times their population versus 1.7 times their population. So you'd think that means 2 x the probability of a black male being a serial killer so right on the dividing line of what I consider an Indicator.
Do you see the flaw in that logic? You stated the flaw already. Black would be more likely to "commit crimes than whites" or to be charged with a crime. Anything more than double criminal propensity and you're back to no Racial Indicator in favor of Blacks because you can't prove criminal propensity in America isn't partly based on racism and exclusion from any possibility of mainstream success through "legal" means. All things are not equal. If they were, the rates might be even more skewed.
There are so many other problems, mostly with categorization of serial crimes.
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Post by steve on Jan 17, 2018 23:21:42 GMT -5
Their statistics used the wrong definition - two or more killings rather than 3. You need at least three especially if there was a major gap after the second which means he could have stopped before becoming an official serial killer. I'll accept 20 % black serial killers post-integration with all types of serial killers lumped together. I don't know about pre. I agree they should have included possible black male or probable black male in their profile. RE: Propensity of serial killer behavior. To me, anything higher than 2 x the going rate is an Indicator of a possibility of serial Homicidal nature (not behavior). You might say, oh there's only 6% black men and they're 20 % of all the serial killers. Whites males are 31 % and 52 % of all the serial killers. Comparatively that 3.3 times their population versus 1.7 times their population. So you'd think that means 2 x the probability of a black male being a serial killer so right on the dividing line of what I consider an Indicator.Do you see the flaw in that logic? You stated the flaw already. Black would be more likely to "commit crimes than whites" or to be charged with a crime. Anything more than double criminal propensity and you're back to no Racial Indicator in favor of Blacks because you can't prove criminal propensity in America isn't partly based on racism and exclusion from any possibility of mainstream success through "legal" means. All things are not equal. If they were, the rates might be even more skewed. There are so many other problems, mostly with categorization of serial crimes. What am I missing? I'm not "into" serial killers like some in this group, but the link that you posted has a pie chart showing that 51.9% of serial killers are white and 39.8% are black, which comes from someone called Enzo Yaksic of the Murder Accountability Project. If you do the math, it seems to me that only 1.6% of white men become serial killers, while 6.6% of black men become serial killers. Now you're saying that only 20% of serial killers are black. You also say that "you can't prove criminal propensity in America isn't partly based on racism," which I find kinda strange. I assume that by racism that you're saying white people in America are racist, but that wouldn't have an effect on whether a black man committed a crime. Jason is from Louisiana, but I've lived in New York all of my life and from what I've seen, the reason more blacks are arrested and charged with crimes is because they commit more crimes. I think that it's genetic myself. Is that something that criminal profilers take into consideration, that some races or nationalities are more likely to commit certain crimes than others?
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Post by Deleted on Jan 18, 2018 0:11:30 GMT -5
There are definitely races that commit certain crimes over others. Some commit more domestic crimes. Some non-domestic. But we're talking about serial killers specifically. And I'm thinking we're talking about cold blooded women killers. So I'm trying to be accurate fair and honest and as clinical as possible. Yes 20 percent Black. That's by the strict definition of serial killer. 3 or more. Not two people only. Even the debunkers of the "white myth" say 20%. www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wicked-deeds/201412/serial-killer-myth-6-they-are-all-whiteThat's 2x the rate of Whites and 2x is the rate I use for an Indicator but I usually use rate Indicators against the entire population not one segment against another which is not koshur. Anything less there's too much margin for error. I'd leave out the propensity versus excuses for raping and stealing which really has nothing to do with cold-blooded women killing but I'll look at the numbers to see whether there is criminal consistency. The ratio of other crimes is about 60:40 when the population ratio is 31:6 percent so you have 2x versus 7x so I estimate Blacks commit crimes 3 1/2 times more often yet they are only 2 x more likely than a White to be a serial killer (less to be a Ted Bundy type but I don't know by how much). So it's well within the margin of error that I'm setting. www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/apr/02/sally-kohn/sally-kohn-white-men-69-percent-arrested-violent/Whites however are consistent in their commission of crimes in general and their cold-blooded women killing. 60% of criminals 52 % of serial killers, of majority women. Also I don't really rate rapists who break into a house and kill so as not to be identified as real legit serial killers but the end result is the same so I won't make an issue.
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