Profiling Smofiling
I spent several years working in correction. Adjudicated offenders of everything from petty theft to attempted murder. In addition I have a successful background when working with the Severely and Emotionally Disturbed. So, when some particularly heinous crime takes place I get the question, “What kind of person would do such a thing?”
People have a tendancy to think the discipline of profiling will tell you who the person is. But, really it tells you just the opposite.
When working within a set of acceptable behavioral parameters most people fall into a group who agree to abide by a common set of operational norms. Those who do not agree, or fail to percieve those norms behave outside the expected parameters and thus they don’t fit the profile you would expect.
The easiest element to identify is that of socioeconomic status. By and large, people of middle and higher economic class don’t need to steal low dollar value items (yes, I know there are exceptions). So, you can profile out a large sector of the population when looking at this type of crime.
The next step is data mining. You look at the socio-economic class of the majority of the persons who have been convicted of similar crimes in the past.
Next you follow the same steps for each of the following:
- gender
- age
- race
- marital status
- educational background
- ethnicity
Finally, you build a formal expression describing the most likely traits of the individual.
Doesn’t sound like science does it? It isn’t. But, neither was psychology 60 years ago.