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Top Down Approach. (America. (They were classified into two groups,…
Top Down Approach.
America.
They were classified into two groups, organised and disorganised.
Organised offenders were intelligent, socially and sexually competent, lived with somebody and planned their attacks.
These classifications are used to compare information from new crime scened to make judgements bases on past experience.
Disorganised offenders were less intelligent, socially and sexually incompetent, and were often loners who acted on impulse.
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The FBI began by interviewing 36 convicted serial killers and sex murderers to gain an insight into their thinking and behaviour.
FBI Stages.
Crime classification - Crime into category based on data #
Crime Reconstruction - Developing a hypothesis about the victim and their habits #
Data assimilation - Collection of available information. #
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Studies
Pinizzotto and Finkel used two closed police cases and compared the profiles produced by trained proffessions, students and the FBI with no profiling training and clinicl psychologists. #
One case was a sex case, the homocide, profilers were more accurate in the sex offense case , but no significantly better than the untrained people for the homocide case. #
The study concluded that profiling Can be some use, but in some cases, does not significantly help.
Evaluation
Strength
A second strength of the top-down approach is that it can be deemed to be holistic. This, therefore, means that the approach accounts for factors such as influential factors which mean the approach attempts to understand the individual through the crime scene.
one strength of the top down approach is that it has useful application in real life as it allows authorities to differentiate between an organised criminal and a disorganised criminal
Weakness
This is based on interview with sex offenders and therefore limits the generalisability of the approach.
It might not lways be possible t classify offenders into two cleear cut categories. this is deterministic to persume a criminal will fall neatly into categories.
The approach is unreliable as canter criticizes this research and says that aspects of each typology always occur together and that to try ad separates them makes a false definition.
As the approach uses unstructured interviews with serial killers is problematic as each murderer would have been asked different questions and is therefore not reliable.