Criminal Profiling : Principles and Practice

By Richard N. Kocsis
Totowa, NJ: Humana Press, 2006

Criminal profiling - an investigative tool which uses crime scene characteristics to generate probable descriptive information about behaviours, personality, and personal characteristics of an offender, narrowing the field of suspects and aiding in apprehension efforts - has attained unprecedented recognition in spite of a clear lack of empirical criminological evidences supporting its validity and assumptions. Over the past two decades, Dr. Richard N. Kocsis, a forensic psychologist, has been one of the few scholars to conduct empirical research and publish numerous peer-reviewed articles on the accuracy and skills of criminal profiling. Moreover, he has investigated the underlying psychological mechanisms in serial crimes, leading to the development of his own approach to criminal profiling – Crime Action Profiling (CAP). His book, Criminal Profiling: Principles and Practice, is a clear, concise, and understandable account of the development of his own research and approach to profiling.   

The book commences by briefly describing what is criminal profiling, its origins, as well as the applications and objectives of the criminal profile. Right from the beginning, the reader is aware of the numerous challenges that face this investigative technique, namely the lack of universal definition but more importantly, the presence of rivalling schools of thought.  

Chapter 2, 3, and 4 discuss the accuracy and skills of criminal profiling. Kocsis summarizes results from his own original research that highlight the unreliability of the utilitarian argument (if profiles were not useful, the police would not use them) and suggest that police officers may erroneously perceive greater accuracy in a criminal profile. Probably one of the most interesting and controversial findings though, concern the skills of criminal profilers. Thus, contrary to popular beliefs, it seems that investigative experience is not as important in the accurate construction of a profile in comparison with an understanding of human behaviour. Results also confirm the skills of criminal profilers to outperform other sample groups (e.g., detectives, students, psychics) when it comes to accurately predicting characteristics of an unknown offender.

Before discussing the CAP approach, Kocsis offers in chapter 5 a new definition of serial crime, emphasizing the psychological mechanisms related to the commission of a series of similar offences. The following chapters focus on the Crime Action Profiling approach (Chapter 6) and its application to serial rape (chapter 7), sexual homicide (chapter 8), and serial arson (chapter 9). Kocsis does a tremendous job at explaining the functioning of the Multidimensional Scaling method that has been used in his approach (see also the Appendix A for a beginner’s guide to inferential statistics). It gives the novice in statistics as well as the more familiar ones a better understanding of this statistical approach that has been characterized by some as “obscure”. Moreover, the CAP approach to serial crimes yields very important findings to the study of profiling: (1) there is an identification of behaviours on the crime scene that are common and do not permit to distinguish types of offenders; (2) the different types of criminal behaviour identified may be linked to probable offender characteristics; and (3) the profiles identified take into account some situational/contextual factors (e.g., crime scene in a public place, victims’ characteristics). All these features have been neglected in most studies on criminal profiling.

A book on criminal profiling would not be complete without a chapter on geographic profiling. Chapter 10 reviews some of the research on this technique and describe the CAP approach to the offence location patterns. The book ends with a very useful and informative chapter on procedural considerations and format guidelines to an effective profile.