Artical
Artical
Artical
For 16 years, "mad bomber" George Metesky eluded New York City
police. Metesky planted more than 30 small bombs around the city between
1940 and 1956, hitting movie theaters, phone booths and other public areas.
In 1956, the frustrated investigators asked psychiatrist Jamems Brussel, New
York State's assistant commissioner of mental hygiene, to study crime scene
photos and notes from the bomber. Brussel came up with a detailed
description of the suspect: He would be unmarried, foreign, self-educated, in
his 50s, living in Connecticut, paranoid and with a vendetta against Con
Edison--the first bomb had targeted the power company's 67th street
headquarters.
While some of Brussel's predictions were simply common sense, others were
based on psychological ideas. For instance, he said that because paranoia
tends to peak around age 35, the bomber, 16 years after his first bomb, would
now be in his 50s. The profile proved dead on: It led police right to Metesky,
who was arrested in January 1957 and confessed immediately.
In the following decades, police in New York and elsewhere continued to
consult psychologists and psychiatrists to develop profiles of particularly
difficult-to-catch offenders. At the same time, though, much of the criminal
profiling field developed within the law enforcement community--particularly
the FBI.
Nowadays profiling rests, sometimes uneasily, somewhere between law
enforcement and psychology. As a science, it is still a relatively new field with
few set boundaries or definitions. Its practitioners don't always agree on
methodology or even terminology. The term "profiling" has caught on among
the general public, largely due to movies like "The Silence of the Lambs" and
TV shows like "Profiler." But the FBI calls its form of profiling "criminal
investigative analysis"; one prominent forensic psychologist calls his work
"investigative psychology"; and another calls his "crime action profiling."
Despite the different names, all of these tactics share a common goal: to help
investigators examine evidence from crime scenes and victim and witness
reports to develop an offender description. The description can include
psychological variables such as personality traits, psychopathologies and
behavior patterns, as well as demographic variables such as age, race or
geographic location. Investigators might use profiling to narrow down a field of
suspects or figure out how to interrogate a suspect already in custody.
"In some ways, [profiling] is really still as much an art as a science," says
psychologist Harvey Schlossberg, PhD, former director of psychological
services for the New York Police Department. But in recent years, many
psychologists--together with criminologists and law enforcement officials--
have begun using psychology's statistical and research methods to bring more
science into the art.