Police profiling has some merit

Before we part ways I would like to say that it was a pleasure debating you, and I hope that we can continue our dialogue at another time. Best of luck to you. With that, lets finish up. "In 1984 by George Orwell, he introduces the concept of "thoughtcrime" where even ones thoughts, whether inoccent or no, can incriminate you. If we were to modify this theory, we can see the concept of appearancecrime, where ones LOOKS can be incriminating. " Immaterial, because that isn't what profiling is. Profiling is a cognitive theory to establish behavioral composites. I hardly see how you can invoke Animal Farm in to this debate because it is completely speculative. I can think of a few legitimate CON arguments for profiling, but what you are suggesting is specious and borderline conspiratorial. Unless you can reasonably connect point A (profiling) to point B (thought crime), I see no reason for even mentioning it. As delicately as I can put it. .. it's silly. I really see no further need to indulge this kind of nonsense. In closing I want to point out the positive aspects of profiling. A profiler will examine all available evidence from any given crime scene, then juxtapose the information gathered by similar crimes. The attempt is to establish patterns specific to a demographic. From there they can establish certain behaviors of, say, a killer, and hopefully can narrow a suspect down to a certain type of individual with certain predilections, but most importantly, trends that might lead the police to them. For instance, certain serial killers are prone to ritualizing the crime scene. They usually have a modus operandi specific to them. All of these M. O. 's have meaning to them for the killer -- the placement of the victims body, the way they killed their victim, the intentional clues they left, etc. These are often as unique as signatures and finger prints. Criminal psychologists can establish trends of narcissism, delusions of grandeur, impotence, low self-esteem, sociopathy, psychopathy, former child abuse, probable age, level of intelligence, eccentricity, etc, etc. .. the list goes on. As I said earlier, there is a science to this. These aren't guesstimates, these inferences are borne out of careful study of empirical evidence and/or psychological profiles. "Investigative Psychology grows directly out of empirical research and logical inference to cover the full range of investigative activities not only the preparation of 'profiles'. The inference processes at the heart of Investigative Psychology contrast with the approach used in the FBI which emphasises subjective processes such as "thinking like the criminal". Investigative Psychology stresses that the results of scientific psychology can contribute to many aspects of civilian and criminal investigation, including the full range of crimes from burglary to terrorism, not just those extreme crimes of violence that have an obvious psychopathic component. " Source: . http://en.wikipedia.org... I therefore can't stress enough that criminal profiling is an invaluable. Like anything else, it is not a perfect science, but it is indeed a science nonetheless which has yielded many positive aspects -- namely, getting sex offenders, rapists, serial killers, and spree killers off of the streets.