Criminal profiling

[Tomcat]

The emergence of psychology at the end of the 19th century and its rapid development in the next century influenced many areas of science and knowledge. The achievements of psychology began to be used in the context of solving various issues and tasks. The possibilities of using psychological knowledge, tools, experience of specialists began to be used in operational-search and investigative practice. And although for a long time the professional interaction of criminologists and psychologists was episodic and far from ubiquitous, over time, having shown its effectiveness, it organically blended into the system of applied forensics, significantly updating its strategy, tactics and methodology, significantly increasing its potential and opening up new perspectives.

One of these prospects was the possibility of studying the personal prerequisites of a crime, which is necessary for reconstructing the psychological side of a committed illegal act, understanding the motives and psychological mechanisms of its formation. An effective method of cognizing criminal behavior is the psychological typology of the personality of the criminal, which allows you to form an idea of the most general, stable, essential psychological characteristics of a certain type of personality of the criminal. The main advantage of this approach is that it allows you to solve a practically important problem - it helps to solve crimes committed by a certain type of criminal. For the first time, an attempt to link antisocial behavior and biological personality traits belonged to the Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, the founder of the anthropological direction in criminology and criminal law, whose main idea was the idea of a natural born criminal. He can be called the founder of the criminal profiling method.

A criminal profile is most often understood as a description of an unidentified criminal. Unlike a verbal portrait, a psychological portrait is a complex psychological characteristic of a person, containing a description of his characteristics, behavioral signs and possible actions in certain significant circumstances. In the context of forensic science, the main function of a psychological portrait is to be a means of searching, identifying a criminal whose identity has not been established. This means that the profile of the offender includes those features that are important for the search and identification of the offender. The method of forming the profile of an unknown criminal is called criminal / forensic profiling.

The statement that the personality of the offender is manifested in his behavior is the theoretical basis of the method. It is postulated that some of the often repetitive, habitual ways of human behavior are brought to the level of automatism, not subject to conscious control. The traces left at the crime scene are a kind of "psychological markers" that make it possible to judge the usual ways of behavior, and through them - about the personality of the offender.

Profilers (specialists working in this field) apply various theories from different fields of knowledge (psychology, forensic medicine, psychiatry, psychopathology, sociology, forensic science, statistics, etc.), which allow them to form a search portrait of an unknown criminal. The main idea of the profile formation method is to study the connections between the crime and the characteristics of the offender, its characteristics, in the recreation and reconstruction of the criminal's personality based on the traces left by him during the crime, at the crime scene, including on the victim's body.
When creating a criminal profile, the most collected information, both about the offender and the victim, is analyzed: the actions of the offender before the crime, the behavior of the victim before the crime, the location of the victim at the time of the crime, the presence or absence of significant evidence indicating what the offender did to the victim, as well as the sequence of events and the behavior of the subject of the crime before and after it. In addition, the profiler studies the risks of victimization and crime - examines the lifestyle, social circle, work activities of the offender and victim.

Based on the information received, conclusions are made about the possible meaning and motivation of specific actions. The following characteristics can be included in the offender's profile:

• the predominant motivation for the crimes;
• individual personality traits - habits, inclinations, skills;
• gender and age range;
• area of residence, work, service, study;
• level of education and professional qualifications;
• occupation;
• marital status and the presence of children;
• past convictions;
• the presence of mental, as well as other pathology;
• level of sexual maturity;
• risk factors;
• anthropological and dynamic characteristics of the face (type of appearance, physique, pantomime, etc.).
• the degree of familiarity between the perpetrator and the victim.
• options for responding to the situation of police investigation and interrogation, etc.

Based on the results of profiling, a final written document is drawn up containing a description of the profile of the alleged offender.
An example of a profile description: “Crimes committed by criminals from different age groups differ. So, adolescents and young men can commit illegal actions in relation to younger children. At the same time, unlike adults, adolescents and young men usually use threats, intimidation of their victim, tend to inflict bodily harm on the victim, which is indicated in the materials of the criminal case. Such young men, as a rule, are impulsive, hyperactive, prone to early alcoholism."

The main urgent problem of criminal profiling is to improve the quality of the formation of profiles, which gives the investigating authorities additional information about the alleged perpetrator, allowing the investigating authorities to focus on a much smaller group of suspects, narrowing the pool of suspects. For this, the method of analyzing the correspondence of the psychological portrait of the expert to the profile of the person who committed the crime under investigation is used. This method is a process of collecting information about the event being investigated - a trace picture of the crime (traceology, victimology, ballistics, fingerprinting, handwriting, etc.), compiling a profile of the alleged offender (type of offender, degree of familiarity between the offender and the victim, motivation of the offender, description of appearance a criminal, a method of criminal action, crime scene, the degree of organization of the offender, etc.), and then - the process of collecting information about the most expert of all possible sources of information (socio-psychological characteristics , ethno-cultural characteristics, operational information on criminal convictions, medical history, etc.). After that, the information received is analyzed and a conclusion is made on the degree of correspondence of the psychological portrait of the expert with the profile of the person of the alleged offender who committed the crime under investigation. and then - the process of collecting information about the most expert of all possible sources of information (socio-psychological characteristics, ethno-cultural characteristics, operational information on criminal convictions, medical history, etc.).