Authors: Paul Britton
‘How long do you estimate that it will take?’ Dr Laycock asked me.
‘Two years.’
She flinched. ‘It can’t be two years. It has to be done much more quickly. The most we can give you is seventy-five days.’
‘That’s impossible,’ I uttered, ‘think of the people who have to be interviewed and the literature that must be reviewed - not just here but overseas.’
Dr Laycock understood the scale of the task but explained that the review was long overdue and had virtually been dropped in her hands. ‘We’re not happy with what we see and we need to have some answers quickly.’
‘Based on your time scale all you’ll get is a very sketchy impression,’ I said.
‘I appreciate that. Give us the overview so we can make some decisions.’
The Home Office wanted a report based on just seventy-five days’ work but I had a full-time job as well as the growing number of requests from police to assist in operational inquiries. This meant having to squeeze out the time from my annual leave entitlement, as well as using weekends and bank holidays. It took a year and in that time I interviewed a great many individuals and most institutions which had something relevant to say about offender profiling.
The questionnaire that Ian Johnston had first wanted to send out to Chief Constables and Heads of CID now proved vital in identifying psychologists and psychiatrists who had assisted police with major inquiries. Detectives were asked why a profiler had been called, what were the case details and how accurate had the profile been?
At the same time, I interviewed psychologists involved in areas of research that had a bearing on offender profiling and looked at developments such as CATCHEM, the largest complete database in the country dealing with child murders, abductions and missing children. It had been established in the wake of the Hogg, Maxwell, Harper murders - three schoolgirls taken from different counties but killed by the same man. Set up in Derbyshire in 1986, the database held details of child-related crimes dating back to 1961 and I saw that, properly enhanced, it would be a strong element in a future offender profiling system.
Ian Johnston and Detective Inspector Jon Dawson arranged appointments and acted as my liaison as I met with senior policemen and selected detectives up and down the country, travelling thousands of miles. They were my most important guides as I studied the detective process.
The picture that emerged came as a surprise. Opinions differed enormously. Some experienced investigators were outright hostile, claiming that offender profiling was nothing more than ‘a load of psychological bullshit’ and they would never use it again. Others were impressed and could see real benefits.
The number of bad experiences caused me concern. When I started the review, I thought I might find an occasional offender profile that proved to be less than accurate, but for the first time I discovered the potential for damage to an investigation, and it frightened me. Officers told of profiles that were so inaccurate that if relied upon they would have seriously misled the inquiry team. If this had happened in a murder or rape investigation, then someone else could have died or been attacked.
As the data accumulated the picture didn’t improve. Instead of being a great advance in crime detection, offender profiling in Britain was at risk of being stillborn.
Modern offender profiling began in America with the FBI and it was impossible to do an international review without looking at what had been achieved across the Atlantic.
In Bureau folklore they tell a story about when it all began. A ‘Mad Bomber’ had been terrorizing New York City for more than a decade, sending taunting letters to newspapers and blowing up prominent landmarks. In 1956 American psychiatrist Dr James A. Brussel studied the crime scenes, messages from the bomber and other information, and then told police they were looking for an unmarried, middle-aged Eastern European immigrant, who was a Roman Catholic and lived with his mother in a Connecticut city. He was impeccably neat, hated his father and when arrested would be wearing a double-breasted suit, buttoned to the neck.
When arrested, George Metsky had indeed been wearing a buttoned double-breasted suit. He fitted the profile almost perfectly except for the fact that he resided with his unmarried sisters rather than with his mother.
When asked how he managed this, Brussel explained that he normally examined people and tried to predict how they might react in the future. Instead he reversed the process and by looking at the deeds, tried to work out what sort of person would have done them.
From such celebrated beginnings, profiling fell out of favour during the 1960s but picked up again when the landscape of violent crime in America began changing in the 1970s as the murder rate soared and a growing number were committed by strangers.
In the early 1970s, the Bureau had opened the new FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, which included a fledgling Behavioural Sciences Unit. The officers involved were mainly occupied with teaching but occasionally they analysed violent crimes and ‘profiled’ likely suspects.
None of them were trained psychologists although some had studied the literature and, like many investigators, they relied heavily on their detective expertise and knowledge of past cases. Within a decade, this behavioural approach to crime had led to the establishment of the FBI’s National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP).
The latter is a reporting system where crimes are summarized in a sixteen-page questionnaire filled out by homicide detectives. The primary aim of the scheme was to link unsolved murders that stretched across state borders but it soon became a vital tool in offender profiling.
Because of America’s vast size the FBI didn’t have enough experienced profilers available to travel the country, studying crime scenes. They could use the details gathered by local police to classify crimes into broad categories and draw up offender profiles. Although much of this work had been computerized, profiling still relied heavily on a brainstorming approach by experienced FBI agents, together with psychological background research. This had proved effective and their success rates compared favourably to anywhere in the world.
Obviously, one of the first people I went to see when I began the review was Dr David Canter of the Offender Profiling Research Unit at Surrey. I wanted material from him so that I could check on the success of his database and the offender profiles it had generated. The Home Office had found it difficult to get this data, but I assumed that Dr Canter and everyone involved would be interested in working together and making sure the review succeeded.
I went to see him several times and explained that I looked forward to his cooperation and participation. However, on a subsequent visit Dr Canter explained that he didn’t think it appropriate for the Surrey profiles to be included in the review because he didn’t agree with the method of evaluation. I was surprised. How else were offender profiles to be judged, if not by their accuracy and value?
He told me that operational profiling didn’t really interest him and he couldn’t understand why police officers kept coming to him and asking him for profiles. I suggested it might have something to do with the name he’d given his project.
The review moved forwards until eventually I awaited only the material from the Offender Profiling Research Unit. It would have been unthinkable to complete my work without input from a body that had actually been funded by the Home Office and set up specifically to provide an offender profiling service for the police.
It led to a crunch meeting at Surrey Police Headquarters, when Dr Canter agreed to provide copies of the profiles. He also made it clear that none of them had been generated by the database of sexual murders and rapes that had been portrayed as the scientific bedrock of his profiling work. Instead, Dr Canter and his team had adopted a brainstorming approach of bouncing ideas around until they agreed on the offender’s details. This is a method which I had understood Dr Canter to have earlier argued was not the way forward.
Eventually, I received thirty-six of the promised fifty profiles from the Surrey project and the results were disappointing. Because of the questionnaires filled out by the various police forces I already had a reasonable idea of what to expect. There was little evidence that the profiles were accurate or that they had contributed to arrests being made. Two particular cases had been put forward by Surrey as examples of successful work. In the first, a serial rape inquiry, senior detectives reported that if the team had acted on the guidance of the profile the investigation would have been seriously hindered or misled. In particular, they drew attention to the fact that two separate series of rapes were being perpetrated, but had not been identified in the original profile advice, and that this was only recognized by police sources later in the investigation, which in turn led to the production of an amended profile. The area in which the profile predicted the single rapist would live, and by implication where the police should look, was at the opposite side of the investigation area to where he actually lived. They felt that other aspects of the profile had simply been a repetition of information provided by the investigators.
In the second case, the murder of a prostitute, a senior detective reported that the profile had been wrong in most respects, including having indicated a single male offender (three were convicted); that the offence had been sudden, disorganized and impulsive (it had been planned); the offender would come to police attention due to sudden violence or associated lack of control (they didn’t); he would possibly be mentally disturbed (they were not); he would live more than one mile from the scene (they lived within a short walking distance); and he would show considerable remorse for his crime and would admit it if ‘firmly accosted’ (there was no evidence of remorse in those convicted and no admissions were made during the interrogations).
This effectively marked the end of the further government funds for the Surrey database profiling exercise, although the M.Sc. in Investigatory Psychology has continued to be popular.
In June 1992, I delivered my report to a small executive meeting at the Home Office and then to the ACPO Crime Sub-Committee. Not surprisingly, many people felt let down because it proved to be such a damning report, yet I told them to look past the rhetoric and disappointment and they would see the gold.
They had to look at what was being done elsewhere, particularly with CATCHEM, and at Broadmoor, and, for methodology, at Cambridge. The Dutch had begun experimentally adapting the FBI system to a European setting and there was sound evidence of successful work by individual NHS and university psychologists associated with offender profiling. From all these solid, continuous and positive sources, it was possible to see a future for offender profiling but there had to be a far better method of evaluating its success and securing its development.
I made a series of formal recommendations as to how this might be achieved, the major point being that any future offender profiling service had to be entirely owned and guided by the police. No-one with a financial or a reputation-enhancing interest should be involved in the management. Every profile had to be followed up for accuracy and if it wasn’t there, they had to look carefully at where it was obtained.
I set out a blueprint that included a police-run computer-based support system, guided by artificial intelligence principles, that could eventually take out a lot of the donkey work by looking for the presence of certain factors in a crime and drawing particular conclusions from this. I thought it highly unlikely that computers could ever replace experienced psychological profilers in crime analysis but they could save time and act as an early guide for investigators.
Equally, having carefully explored the processes used by detectives in their investigations it was clearly possible to teach police officers to look for psychological clues at a crime scene. One of the major points that came across in my interviews with senior officers was that, despite problems with the accuracy of some profiles, many of them were very enthusiastic about the impetus that profiling had brought to their investigations. A new perspective had been gained by officers when they looked at a crime scene and they took this to their future investigations.
Summing up, I said that the clear goal of my recommendations was to make the UK the major European centre of excellence for offender profiling within two to three years.
With very little discussion and a sense of genuine excitement, all of the recommendations were accepted.
Millgarth Police Station in Leeds looks like an enormous modern red-brick building block that someone accidentally dropped into the middle of the last century. The result is totally incongruous with the Victorian working-class terraces, workshops and garages that fill the surrounding acres and represent older Leeds.
The station had the largest incident room I’d ever seen, an enormous open-plan office which had been zoned into sections for house-to-house inquiries, vehicle tracing, intelligence, known associates and the other specialist fields of major investigations that rarely come to public notice.
Detective Chief Superintendent Bob Taylor gave me the tour. A bear of a man, solid right through, he looked like a Celtic warrior with his dark hair and bushy moustache. I’d never met Taylor before and don’t know how he got my name or telephone number.
Looking me straight in the eyes, he spoke frankly. ‘I
have a very difficult and complex murder inquiry. To be honest it’s a bloody nightmare because nothing makes sense. All we have are questions.’
He paused to shrug off his jacket. ‘Have you read about the murder of Julie Dart?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, for operational reasons we’ve been careful about releasing details. Let me give you the whole picture. Julie disappeared from Leeds on the ninth of July [1991]. We found her body ten days later in a field about eighty miles south of here, near Grantham. She’d been battered to death with a hammer or a brick.’