ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Gabrielle Salfati, one of the original IP team, describes some of the basic premises behind one of the approaches within David Canter’s general methodological paradigm (see Chapter 1). She outlines one IP approach to investigative inferences, that is the relating of offence actions to offender characteristics. This question of what used to be called ‘offender profiling’ as Gabrielle explores, is an issue on which David Canter is particularly adamant; there is no special ‘profiling’ process (see Canter 2011; also Section 4, this volume). His focus then rather than on evaluating and assessing a mythical process, has been on developing the theoretical and empirical models that relate the action and characteristic domains, in much the same way that particular relationships are established in many less glamorous areas of science (Canter, 1993, 1995; Canter and Youngs, 2009).
