Criminal Investigations: Criminal Profiling

Criminal profiling, also known as criminal profiling, is an activity that assists investigators in identifying unknown criminals through the study of the crime scene. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was the first law enforcement agency to apply criminal profiling techniques to support investigative work in particularly heinous crimes, with no apparent motive and characteristics of serial offenses.

Criminal profiling therefore originated in the United States and is embodied in an approach called Crime Scene Analysis. Behavior reflects the personality of a criminal during the commission of a specific crime and mirrors their personal traits—for example, elements present at a homicide scene can help identify certain traits belonging to the offender.

The offender’s history and the events that shaped their personality explain their actions before, during, and after the crime. Criminal profiling can suggest many elements to investigators, such as age, sex, race, marital status, work habits, and much more, including the likely residence in relation to the crime scene. This is aided by geographical profiling, which analyzes all elements linked to the crime and, through sophisticated variables and software, narrows down a geographical area as the probable place of residence of the offender.

Although criminal profiling is not considered a source of evidence within our legal system, but rather an alternative means of searching for evidence sources, Argo’s staff relies on expert profilers to gather important elements and build the criminal’s profile. Criminal profiling is used during the investigative phase to support classical investigation methods; therefore, at least within the Italian legal system, the profiler does not provide the name of the presumed perpetrator but aims to identify the sequence of events that occurred at the crime scene (criminodynamics) and the elements underlying the criminal behavior (criminogenesis). It is then up to traditional investigations to associate this information with identifying the responsible party.