Criminal profiling

Abstract

Criminal profiling (CP) is often used to refer to a wide variety of investigative and/or forensic techniques that involve the analysis of criminal behaviour. Both Australia and New Zealand have established major criminal profiling units which collect and analyse data to provide law enforcement agencies with evidence-based offender profiles in order to narrow an offender search or predict offender behaviour. This chapter unpacks the history of CP in Australia and its variant competing schools of thought before critically examining the nexus between investigative/clinical/forensic experience and behaviourally driven empirical data used to infer likely offender characteristics by analysing their criminal behaviour, and the extent to which CP can assist police investigations.