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Offender Profiling

A Rhetorical Journey into Darkness: Crime-Scene Profiling as Burkean Analysis

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Abstract:

This essay focuses upon dramatistic nature of crime scene profiling, the technique used to infer the motivations that underlie a baffling but increasingly familiar human act: the “stranger killing.” It argues that this technique of interpreting the symbolic “text” of the crime scene is essentially a rhetorical method that employs with different names the elements and ratios of Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad. My study, like other broad applications of Burkean principles, both validates Burke’s observation of the ubiquity of the two principal dramatistic ratios (act-scene and scene-agent) and affirms the symbolic infusion of all human action, including acts of identification through extreme mortification.

THE MAJOR FEATURE OF ANY STORY of unprovoked violent crime is the baffling question of why such acts occur. Because they are typically random, and because they appear to be without motive as it is commonly understood, these crimes compel our attention even as they terrify and confound us. “Who done...

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Offender Profiling and Investigative Psychology

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Abstract

The origins of ‘Offender Profiling’ in the advice given by police medical advisors and other experts to criminal investigations are briefly outlined. The spread of such advice to police inquiries across the United States in the early 1970s, culminating in its uptake by Special Agents of the FBI in the mid-1970s and the widespread promotion of their services through the fictional writings of Thomas Harris and others is noted. The development beyond the early application to serial killer investigations, and the focus on psychopathological explanations, to cover the full gamut of crime from, for instance, arson and burglary to terrorism, is briefly reviewed. The consideration of the social psychological processes inherent in criminality as well as the characteristics of individual offenders also broadens out the concerns of the field. The linking of crimes to a common offender as well as predicting their future actions further widens the range of issues to be dealt with. The many psychological and practical questions raised by these ‘profiling’activities are

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