“Exploring the Discrepancy: Criminal Profiling in Popular Culture vs. Reality”

QUESTION

Criminal profiling is glamorized in criminal procedural television and movies: profilers can seem to have almost super-sensory powers of perception and are often portrayed as being key to solving cases.

After reviewing the module resources, post to the discussion topic your answers these questions:

• What was your understanding and perception of criminal profiling before this course? (Feel free to name specific movies or shows that come to mind.)
• How did that perception change when you read the statistics and reality about criminal profiling?
• Why do you think profiling’s image in popular culture and its reality in the detective world are so different?

include BOTH in-text citations and a references list besides the ones provided please I need a lot of help

references:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/am-i-right/201206/racial-profiling

https://web.archive.org/web/20140430014324/http://www.racialprofilinganalysis.neu.edu/

https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/criminal

http://uspp.csbsju.edu/research/Sniper.html

Module 6 Profiling Lecture

Now criminal profiling is useful, but it can also go terribly wrong. And it’s a pretty imperfect science. And so we have to keep that in mind. Criminal profiling is the process of developing a profile to narrow down a search for suspects. So for example, criminal profiling is sometimes useful in looking for serial killers, looking for people who repeat crimes with a particular pattern, and in that pattern you begin to develop a profile of the offender.

Two cases of criminal profiles gone terribly wrong would be the Atlanta bombings of 1996, which there was a bombing at the Olympics. Some of you may remember that in 1996. And Richard Jewell was arrested for it because the profile said it was probably a rent-a-cop kind of guy who worked for a security company who was looking for fame and so forth.

And so Jewell was arrested. And it was later found out that he didn’t do it at all and that the real bomber was found later on. And by the time they found the bomber, he had actually done some more damage in the Atlanta area and taken more lives. So in that case, poor profiling not only got the wrong guy rested, but also did little to protect the public.

And then in perhaps one of the weirdest kind of cases of a racial profile, the DC sniper case of, I believe it was in 2002, is another case of really bad profiling. I was traveling to Washington in 2002 as part of a project at the National Institutes of Health and was traveling to Washington during the DC sniper attacks. And I can tell you that it was terrifying. To get on a bus, to get on a train, you’re always looking around. I mean, it terrorized an entire city.

And a number of people were killed by the snipers. The FBI profile was of a single middle-aged white man who had lost a job probably with the government or was still working for the government and who had an axe to grind was the DC sniper. Now we know that the DC snipers were actually two people. One, a middle-aged black man and the other a 17-year-old black man. And so the profile didn’t even get the race of the person right, let alone their age or their occupation.

And that is a shining example of profiling gone bad. And in fact, the actual snipers crossed paths with the police several times in DC in 2002. Now when they changed the profile from a racial profile to a geographic profile and looked for someone who was endemic to that area and started to get hints about where the person might have lived, why they were in this particular area, and then got a couple of leads, they were able to change their profile and to track down the real DC snipers. If you want more information about that, you can Google DC snipers and you’ll come up with a lot of information about it.

So I want you to read the chapter on profiling. I’m going to give you a discussion in the discussion group this week that may cause some controversy. There’s no clear cut answer to this discussion. So I want you to keep the discussion respectful and realize that there are varying opinions based on people’s backgrounds and so forth. So do keep that in mind that there may be some controversy.

And it has to do with an example of a police pull over that may or may not represent racial profiling. And I would like you to take a look at that and tell us whether you think it’s racial profiling or not, but make sure you give us reasons for your answer. Don’t just guess at it, but really come up with a reason why you think it might be racial profiling or might not be racial profiling.

There’s no right or wrong answer to this scenario. Decide and discuss it among yourselves because it will really get you thinking about the nature of profiling and its pros and cons.