Media Coverage : Newspapers





"Profiling Article"

There is a remarkable Bateman cartoon from the early 1930's that shows an ecstatic editor of a tabloid newspaper running into his office. His staff all reveal their delight too, over a punch line which explains that a vicious murder has just been reported in the most horrific circumstances. An update of this cartoon would have to include the extra excitement added by the police announcing that a psychological profiler was helping them to find the culprit. The presence of a 'profiler' provides the media with a clear indication that this is a serious crime being taken seriously and that the events surrounding it are so unusual that good, old-fashioned police work is not enough.

Yet many questions are emerging about what this 'profiling' is and its utility to the police? In America the Washington Sniper frequently escaped capture before he and his accomplice were found asleep in their car. The number plate of the sniper's old Chevrolet had been run through the police database at least ten times because of various suspicions during the killings. Their escape to kill again was in part because 'profilers' had said the Sniper must be a white man, neither of the people arrested being at all mistakable as white.

Another indication of the dangerous territory into which psychological advisors to the police can stray was also shown this week when the British Psychological Society at last started its hearing into complaints of professional misconduct against the actions of the 'profiler' in the Rachel Nickell murder enquiry. Whatever the outcome of that enquiry its very existence shows that 'profiling' may do more harm than good in the wrong hands. Yet another example of these problems was in the Soham search for Jessica and Holly. There the Senior Investigating Officer apparently followed the advice of 'profilers' in talking directly to the abductor through the media, fruitlessly as it turned out.

Part of the problem is that in the public mind, and probably in the mind of many police officers 'profilers' have taken on the mantle of what was 'the man from the Yard' in the old 'B' movies. He (always he) it was who had the special insights that helped police solve unusual cases. In direct descent from Sherlock Holmes many offspring have merged who apparently have special knowledge and skills that enables them to move the plot on faster than the plodding cops. The help to fiction writers of being able to draw on these jokers in the pack is obvious. But the difficulties emerge when the needs of fictional drama and those of real life investigations get confused. 'Profilers' who give advice to investigations still need to be protected by inverted commas. They are not to be mistaken as some firmly established profession like doctors or architects.

The need to treat with caution the claims of 'profilers' can be seen from the constant refrain that the Washington sniper would be white, a confusion of anecdote with science. In the 1980's a couple of the FBI agents, who had jobs at the central FBI training academy in Quantico Virginia, interviewed about 20 incarcerated serial killers. The interviews were rambling affairs with whomever would talk to them and were never summarised in any systematic analysis nor where they backed up by more extensive reviews of larger numbers of cases. What the FBI agents ended up with was therefore a collection of very well known murderers who were willing and able to talk, either to protest their innocence or to gain some further notoriety. Perhaps not surprisingly in 1980's America, the people whom the agents knew about and who were willing to talk to them were all articulate white men. So even though an elementary search through the annals of serial killers will reveal many examples of non-Caucasians, 'profilers' who have not done their homework perpetuate the myth that serial killers are white.

Such simple, over-confident errors can have a huge impact on an enquiry like that in Washington which was getting 1000 calls an hour from the public. If the word is out the killer was white than the masses of untrained call takers, with minimum supervision, would act on the belief that the pundits must be right. The white van seen at so many shooting locations was another discoloured herring. The police, as so often is the case, had no idea of base rates, the background frequency of occurrences that are there what ever is happening. In their search for some sense or clue in the morass of information before them they ignored the possibility that there are a lot of white vans around. They formed the assumption that the coincidental presence of white vans was significant and so did not look closely at the blue Chevrolet in which the killers roamed.

That confusion may well have contributed to loss of life. It is a product of equating the slow accumulation of science with the presence of an all-seeing, all-knowing super-sleuth and of believing that the cable-TV pundits can back up their speculation if only had not been forced into sound-bite communication. Rather than realising that for many of these 'profilers' the sound-bite was all they had to offer.

The people I train as 'profilers' start off studying the professional standards of the British Psychology Society. Those now employed by the police into the investigation of ten or more rapes around the M25 appropriately avoid the media glare as much as they avoid referring to themselves as 'profilers' with or without inverted commas. They see themselves as supporting investigations not offering glitzy pen-pictures. They do this in part by making detectives aware of the pitfalls of ignoring base rates and by presenting their conclusions as summaries of the probabilities that emerge from earlier research.

What I teach on my course, like all scientists, is time travel. We look into the past. From previous cases we try to work out principles that will allow us to extrapolate to crimes that will arise in the future. But like all travels the places we have visited may not be typical of the country and can be very different from where we go to in the future. Scientists are aware of these limitations on their samples but 'profilers' quoted in the newspapers and volunteering their opinions to beleaguered law enforcement agencies are sometimes more interested in grabbing the headlines than couching their opinions within the caveats that good science so often requires.

When a series of violent rapes has been linked to a common offender, as how now happened with Operation Orb, around the M25, the police have an enormous task of making sense of all the possibilities that are thrown up for locating the offender. They are under tremendous pressure to get to the man before he rapes again, or worse. At present their training still focuses on the legal framework of their activities and does not review the emerging scientific findings. This does not mean that those findings need necessarily be especially profound or arcane. In the Washington Sniper case it was obvious from the start that someone would know the offender as a skilled marksman. A quick check with what was known of earlier sniper killers would support that conjecture. What the police can do with this information is another matter.

It is perhaps not so obvious to police that criminals who commit violent crimes over and over again have been found to have a long criminal history. It just does not make psychological sense for someone to suddenly start to rape strangers in a determined and violent way. So when I read that the Kent Assistant Chief Constable David Kelly says 'The evidence from psychological profilers is that it would be highly unusual for someone who had not committed previous offences to commit an offence of the type we saw in November last year,' I know the studies that my graduates are drawing upon and how they have presented them to the investigation. I am still surprised though that such a high ranking officer needs to cite psychological profilers to support a fact that has been in the criminology literature for over 50 years.

We can add to general studies of criminals from our own studies of rapists that eighty percent of them had committed crimes of a non-violent nature. The importance of this for detectives is that they do no limit their searches only to known sex offenders. From interviews of rapists and accounts they have given in court it is also apparent that not all of them target specific types of victims. Certainly once they have started on their criminal spree they become increasingly aware of the opportunities for committing assaults and getting away with it. They become aware of the sorts of areas in which potential victims may be found in vulnerable situations. Understanding this again helps the police to focus on the areas in which the crimes occur rather than putting huge resources into identifying possible links between the victims.

But the science of Investigative Psychology is still in its infancy. Most major enquiries throw up problems to which we have no firm answers. The rapist being searched for in operation Orb is described as possibly being as old as 50. For reasons as much to do with biology as psychology the average age of rapists is around 25, so this man is old for the part he is playing. Also the police admit to having his DNA but it does not appear to be in the national DNA database? Does that mean he was in prison before DNA was regularly taken from convicted criminals and this accounts for the late start (or continuation) of his a career.

There is also a gap of a few months in the attacks after which the rapist moved his assault locations from Kent to Surrey. Did that have something to do with him coming out of prison? John Duffy the 'Railway Rapist' had a year long gap from his assaults and it has never been possible to find that he had done anything much during that time other than watch videos, perhaps planning what he would do next. But Tony McClean who terrorised Notting Hill in the early 1980's had a two-year break from raping whilst he was serving a prison sentence for burglary.

The M25 rapist is reported to take items of clothing from his victims. These have already been called 'trophies' in the press. Although 'trophy' taking has been reported in a few cases of US serial killers I cannot find any record of it in serial rape. An experienced criminal must know the risk to himself of being caught with such evidence. It is therefore tempting to speculate that he is doing it to further demean and frighten the victim or even to taunt the police. Most people could also come up with a more psychosexual explanation in terms of the offender's fantasies. But such speculation in ignorance of exactly what he said to his victims and exactly how and when the 'trophies' were removed is pointless. It is also of far less help to the investigation than finding the items stolen from his victims.

The 'trophies' give the media a label to put on the rapist and lots for 'profilers' to chew on. They give editors of tabloids and TV news programmes a hook for the understandable interest and fear that any assaults on strangers generate. If this vile and violent man is to be captured, though, the public and the police must not assign him to some fictional stereotype and be alert to the possibility that even the most careful experts do not know a great deal about the minds of violent men.





David Canter is Professor of Psychology at The University of Liverpool where he Directs the Centre for Investigative Psychology. His television series Mapping Murder continues on Channel 5 next Friday.



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