The Psychology of Criminal Justice , Part 1

So where do we begin? How are we going to
find the person who committed this crime?

Obviously, we could look at the results of
any forensic tests, we could talk to eyewitnesses
and so on. But, forensic tests take time,
and don't always provide a conclusive result.They might only provide part of the information
you need, and eyewitness accounts are not always available.
Obviously in our case, we have some eyewitnesses,
and we will return to consider eye witness evidence shortly in a future episode. But
let's start by trying to identify the suspect from what we know about the crime itself.
This is called offender profiling, and one famous example of profiling, is in the case
of the Washington Snipers. Between the 2ndand 22nd of October in 2002, 10 people were
murdered and a further 3 wounded in Maryland,Virginia and Washington, DC in the United
States of America. All victims were shot at a distance, with a single rifle shot, and
every time the killers disappeared in amongst the confusion that resulted.The shootings appeared random. They took place
in grocery store car parks, at petrol stations,
while victims were mowing their lawns or sitting
reading a book. There was nothing to link 
the victims. These shootings appeared for
all intents and purposes to be random. Now understandably these shootings caused fear
and panic in the community. The pressure wason to apprehend the culprit, but for investigators
there wasn't really that much to go on.Eyewitness accounts were few and often contained
conflicting information. The media was incrediblyinterested in this case and many were called
on to give their opinion as to who it wasthat was committing these crimes. Those who
commented ranged from forensic psychologists,to criminologists, to homicide detectives
to self-taught and FBI trained criminal profilers.These publicly available profiles, while far
less detailed than would be developed in usefor a typical case, give us a unique opportunity
to look at what the profilers said the culprit
or culprits would be like. And we can compare
these descriptions with the known characteristicsof those who were subsequently caught and
convicted of these crimes. So, if we limitourselves to just those profiles provided
by self-professed profilers or FBI trained
profilers we can see that there are some inconsistencies
in their comments. So on the topic of who
is the sniper, Pat Brown, who a self-taught
profiler and author, stated on CNN on October
11, 2002, so at this stage 9 days and 9 shootings
into this spate of criminal activity:"This guy is a psychopath...He's involved in power control, and he might like Rambo movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger, anything that gives him the feeling of power that he controls the universe."

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