What is Offender Profiling? Part 2 of 7 of the ‘What is Investigative Psychology?’ series

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Offender profiling is a prioritisation tool. When the police are looking for an unknown offender in a similar vein to how you might look for a needle in a haystack, effective profiling suggests to the

police which out of the many haystacks they should look in first, based on a behavioural analysis of the case. Whilst offender profiling has been this very mysterious and glamorous thing that

near-psychic people do in films and TV shows, in real life there have been a number of successes and a number of failures. Investigative psychology encompasses a lot more than offender profiling,

but even that it does with a scientific method. In the UK, the people who do the actual offender profiling, the National Crime Agency’s behavioural investigative advisers (BIAs), use offender profiling as only one of the tools they offer police forces, amongst several others. Providing behavioural investigative advice (BIA) is the practice of using the individual characteristics of the offence as well as the unknown offender’s behaviour and choices that can be gleaned from the crime site or the victim’s account, to advance the investigation....