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Academy of Behavioral Profiling

A Letter from the President

Dear Current and Future Colleagues:

Welcome to our website.

The Academy of Behavioral Profiling is the first independent, non-partisan professional association devoted to the professionalization of evidence based, or "deductive," criminal profiling techniques and crime analysis.

The general public and many in the forensic professions are not commonly aware that there are currently no accepted educational requirements for criminal profilers, no ethical guidelines, no peer review; nor in many quarters are any of these parameters welcome. That is to say, in the current environment, anyone may refer to himself or herself as a criminal profiler without actual qualification.

To begin the task of professionalization, individuals of varied but specific backgrounds have joined together to found this concerted, multidisciplinary effort. As practitioners in our own disciplines, we struggle with what has been done in the past, what we are doing now, how we are doing it, and why.

The academy is comprised of three sections, with the knowledge base of each complimenting the others: investigative, forensic science & behavioral science. While the founding members of the academy have different educational backgrounds and professional experiences, it is this embracing of a multidisciplinary framework that we believe will strengthen our efforts and casework.

The academy has several levels of membership. The purpose of this is to accommodate the various levels of education, experience and interest in the subject of criminal profiling. This is also to promote advancement in the membership through achievement. As such, we hope to engage individuals with an academic interest in profiling, as well as an applied professional interest.

It is the intention of the Academy to specifically support thorough behavioral approaches to criminal profiling. For those new to the field of criminal profiling, it will take some education to sort this out from other processes, and a letter such as this could not do the subject justice. The academy supports the idea of research efforts in all avenues of profiling, and would not presume to limit a member's practices, as long as those practices are ethical and justifiable (based on education, experience and reasonableness of method). However, the Academy also believes that criminal profiling is best approached as a synthesis of specific offender interaction with specific crime scene evidence and specific victimology. To that end, the development of Profiling and Crime Analysis Guidelines will be a major focus in the coming year. Suffice it to say that the key to the deductive, evidenced based approach is to view each crime, or series of crimes, as its own universe, drawing inferences about the offender from the established evidence, and not from generalized compilations of offender characteristics from other, unrelated cases.

There has been much public and private debate on the subject of who is, or is not, qualified to engage in the rendering of criminal profiles. The reality is that no research or substantial evidence exists to confirm the validity of one type of profiling over another, or one specific educational or experiential background over another, in relation to profiling efficacy. However, time and experience have taught us that the lack of thoroughness, the generalizations, and the vagaries inherent in purely statistical methods are not adequate to the task of explaining or creating an understanding of individual offender behavior, or providing investigatively useful information. Further still, the field of criminal profiling has seen little significant advancement in nearly two decades.

We are dedicated to seeing this change. The other founding members of the Academy and I look forward to raising the practice of evidence based, deductive criminal profiling methods to the level of a profession. We welcome all serious students and practitioners to join us in this endeavor.

Sincerely,

Michael McGrath, MD
President, Academy of Behavioral Profiling