ABSTRACT
Investigative psychology is an overall approach to thinking about criminals and criminal action that captures David Canter's perspective on the psychology of human action and how it should be studied, outlined in his laws of criminality. The contributions that psychologists can make to police investigations are most widely known and understood in terms of 'offender profiles'. Offender profiling, as typically practiced, is the process by which individuals, drawing on their clinical or other professional experience, make judgments about the personality traits or psychodynamics of the perpetrators of crimes. Canter and Youngs favour this general consistency model, suggesting that processes relating to the offender's characteristic interpersonal style may be particularly useful in linking actions and characteristics. The actions–characteristics relationship is further complicated, in that the same action can indicate different characteristics in different contexts or at different points in an offender's criminal progression.
