Criminal Profiling Relies Upon Trait-Based Connections
As noted in Dern, Dern, Horn, and Horn (2009), there appear to be disparities between the conceptions imputed by some commentators on the topic of criminal profiling with the activities of actual practitioners who produce criminal profiles to assist police investigations.2 In this regard, the scientifically conservative language originally con- veyed in early literature considering the concept of offender homology as a “hypoth- esis” that “may” explain part or some aspect of the technique commonly and colloquially known as “criminal profiling” seems to have dissipated over time with apparently increasing juxtapositions in terminology and analogies between the formu- lations of criminal profiles with the topic of personality theory. Naturally, errant label- ing is not a significant issue of concern. However, what presents as problematic are inferences that also seem to arise from this circumstance. That is, the imputed rationale stemming from the designs of studies investigating offender homology seem to have increasingly leaned toward an underlying premise that the process of constructing criminal profiles (apparently conceived within the “trait-based” framework) reflects some form of causative relationship between offender attributes with exhibited crimi- nality that in turn unilaterally forms the mechanism by which criminal profiles are constructed.3
Consequently, there appears to be some disjunction between the perceived rele- vance and use of, for example, offender/crime typologies with the operational practice of constructing criminal profiles. While various studies have developed dichotomies and typologies suggesting common patterns between offender characteristics and crime behaviors, few in the authors’ view feature depth in articulating these findings as framed in etiology or causality. However, it seems that within the various studies investigating offender homology and in some of the arguments stemming therefrom there is an implicit ipso facto connection that offender characteristics are the sole causal basis for exhibited crime behaviors, and that such connections exclusively underpin the formulation of criminal profiles in practice. The apparent failure to clearly find such connections in homology studies is apparently interpreted thereafter to imply that the so-called “trait-based” profiling methods cannot be viable.
It is widely accepted that correlative relationships, even when found to be statisti- cally significant, are not necessarily a determinative basis for causation. Accordingly, while statistically significant correlations may validly be found between, for example, the perpetration of rape and the male gender, this does not imply that when such
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variables are in some capacity studied in reverse, the male gene will be found to be a stable causal predictor for the perpetration of rape. Unfortunately, it seems that reason- ing of this amorphous nature seems to permeate the general rationale and developed arguments stemming from some studies on offender homology. Consequently, in line with the comments noted in Dern et al. (2009), there is scope to contemplate some disparity between the imputations arising from studies into offender homology and how they meaningfully externalize to offender/crime typologies as well as the pro- cesses involved in the imputed “trait-based” methods in the actual construction of criminal profiles.