Darmani wrote:
I think it was my understanding that that actually very accurately broke down the perpetrator. In fact given the fact that they narrowed things down from anyone who could possibly be in the area two very likely a government civil servant agent or even police officer with certain profiles and history
So what's the problem?
The problem is that you hear the success stories but not the ones that were inaccurate. If I recall correctly, the profile issued for the Olympic bomber had law enforcement looking in the wrong direction and led to an innocent person being slandered by the media.
The second problem is that a lot of it is actually more intuitive than you would think and can be done by most officers - for instance FBI profilers will usually speculate on the race / appearance of the suspect, which sounds incredible, but the reasoning for it is just based on who can blend into a given area. Let's be honest, a guy who looks shady and grungy and gross and out of place isn't going to get women into his car, especially in a nice neighborhood, just by talking to them, so unless your victims were taken off the side of their road in the middle of nowhere after their cars broke down, it's a good bet your perpetrator is a good looking smooth talker, or at least someone who doesn't look dangerous. Similarly, at a time in which the entire African-American population of a Southern city is on edge and terrified about a possible white supremacist kidnapping, raping, and murdering their children, a shady white man is not going to go unnoticed and no child is going to get in a vehicle with him. The occupation of the perpetrator can be similarly obvious - they're usually not totally specific (I'll get to that in my third point) but you can tell generally what someone's occupation and education level would be based on the MO. Cutting up a human body is actually very hard, so if it's done cleanly that suggests anatomical knowledge which suggests a medical professional or mortician. If certain tools (medical tools like scalpels would further imply a doctor, certain specialized tools would imply an electrician or carpenter) were used on the victim, that likely means those tools were on hand to the perpetrator and indicates either a career that uses those tools or a very serious hobby / fetish. Similarly a knowledge of the inside workings of how investigations work implies a law enforcement officer (but can also just imply a perpetrator that did their homework). I remember in my Intro to Psychology textbook (I was a psychology minor) they cited a really interesting study where several FBI profilers, law enforcement officers, other first responders like paramedics and firefighters, and average citizens were given a list of crime descriptions of actual crimes for which there were convictions and were asked to guess the age, race, religion, occupation, and criminal history of the perpetrators, and these were then checked against the convictions by the researchers. Profilers did better than average citizens, but still were wrong in many instances, and most interestingly, didn't do any better than the law enforcement officers on average, and even the first responders did better than the control group of average citizens (firefighters were, for obvious reasons, fairly adept at profiling arsonists).
Thirdly, profiles are actually usually very general, so they seem to fit very well most of the time. But it's sort of like astrology or the Myers-Briggs test. It seems amazingly fitting, but usually it's not actually that detailed. Like it sounds really amazing when they predict that the serial killer will be a white blue collar worker with a history of violence against women, and then they catch the guy and he is, but that description actually describes a HUGE swath of American men and isn't actually that useful when you get right down to it. Sometimes more specific details come from the MO but still isn't useful - like you might be able to tell the perpetrator has a foot fetish given he attacked only women wearing high heels and cut their feet off and took them shoe and all, but given that that's usually not on anyone's public record and is also a common and usually harmless fetish, it's not useful to the investigation.
With all of that said, I love Criminal Minds too, or did until it got so twisted I had to quit watching because it was giving me nightmares, but I have to keep in mind that it's basically fantasy, like CSI (which I don't like for a lot of the same reasons I overlook in Criminal Minds but what can I say Reid and Morgan are so cute). They have access to a lot of additional tools to help them that real life profilers wouldn't, for one thing - in real life they'd have to get a warrant for Garcia to access half the records she does on the show, and even then a lot of these records for smaller municipalities wouldn't be in electronic format especially if they were any older than a couple of years.
