If your exclusive interest in the course is the widely held belief that certain individuals can turn up at a crime scene and readily provide a character description of the offender then this course is not for you. Although we do consider certain aspects of criminal profiling, this is a small section of the course and, in the main, it approaches these claims from a rather sceptical viewpoint. If you do decide to join the course you will be given a clear indication of why many staff within the CIP are sceptical of such claims. Moreover, it is clear that in the UK this type of advice is beginning to fall into some disrepute and that what crime analysts, behavioural investigative advisors and individuals employed within the Serious Crime Analysis Section of the National Crime Faculty do is rather different from the media portrayal of what criminal profilers do. We have begun to appreciate some of the difficulties in providing this sort of investigative advice and whilst great leaps have recently been made in linking offences, establishing certain demographic details of offenders and giving advice as to interviewing strategies, plenty more research is needed before one can reliably identify lists of offender characteristics. We do not mean to sound overly negative on this point but we want you to be sure as to what this course is about and whether it is right for you. We are at an exciting stage of IP and no doubt significant steps forward will emerge within the coming years but many of these are likely to be involved in fully understanding police decision making, problem solving, suspect prioritisation - all features of what the police do, as well as features of what the offender does.

We would encourage you, when watching the details of news broadcasts or documentaries about major investigations to closely study two things. Firstly, observe what the police officers did in the investigation. You will soon appreciate how these issues are as, if not more important, than what the offenders did in terms of how quickly and effectively the offence was resolved. Secondly, in programmes that proffer the notion that the profiler was significant in solving the offence, very carefully observe whether this can actually be true. For example, did knowing about the fact that the offender collected pornography help solve the offence. Did the profiler establish anything significant about the offender that might be true about a very large number of people in the normal population - i.e., a male, between 25-35 who lives alone or with his Mother. There are many TV portrayals both in fiction and in documentaries that convey the idea that profilers have some special insight into offenders. However, there is currently hardly any scientific literature to support such an assertion.

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