Offender Profiling Series
Profiling
Property Crimes
Edited by David Canter & Laurence Alison (2000)
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Property Crimes
Profiling Property Crimes
David P. Farrington and Sandra Lambert
Statistical Approaches to Offender Profiling
This research aimed to advance knowledge about how
far it was possible to predict characteristics of offenders from characteristics
of offences, characteristics of victims, and descriptions of offenders
by victims and witnesses. It was based on case files of convicted offenders
(345 burglary and 310 violence) in Nottinghamshire, where nobody (victim,
witness or police) knew the identity of the offender at the time of the
offence. Topics addressed included: (1) characteristics of offenders;
(2) the reliability of police-recorded descriptions of offenders; (3)
how offenders were apprehended; (4) the accuracy of victim and witness
descriptions in relation to police-recorded offender characteristics;
(5) how far victims and witnesses agreed in describing offenders; (6)
how far characteristics of offenders could be predicted from offence and
victim characteristics; (7) how far offenders repeated similar types of
offences and victims; (8) the similarity of co-offenders; and (9) relationships
between age/sex/ ethnicity/address offender profiles, age/sex/address
victim profile and location/site/time/day offence profiles.
David P. Farrington is
Professor of Psychological Criminology at the Institute of Criminology,
Cambridge University. He is president of the European Association of Psychology
and Law, President elect of the American Society of Criminology, and a
Fellow of the British Academy. He has been President of the British Society
of Criminology, Chair of the Division of Criminological and Legal Psychology
of the British Psychological Society, and Vice-Chair of the US National
Academy of Sciences Panel of Violence. He received his PhD in psychology
from Cambridge University, and the Sellin-Glueck Award of the American
Society of Criminology for international contributions to criminology.
His major research interest is in the longitudinal study of delinquency
and crime, and he is Director of the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development,
a prospective longitudinal survey of over 400 London males from age eight
to age 40. In addition to 220 published papers on criminological and psychological
topics, he has published 20 books, one of which, 'Understanding and Controlling
Crime' won the prize for distinguished scholarship of the American Sociological
Association Criminology Section.
Sandra Lambert is a Senior Intelligence Analyst in Hampshire Constabulary. She has been employed by the Police Foundation and by the Cambridge University Institute of Criminology as a researcher on projects directed by Professor Farrington. She has also worked as a Criminal Intelligence Analyst for the Metropolitan Police and as a Research Officer in the Home Office Police Research Group.
