As anyone who watches television detective programmes will know, criminal profiling claims to predict the characteristics of an offender from an analysis of a crime’s circumstances. Most police forces in the developed world use profiling, … Several studies … comparing the predictions of profilers and non-profilers in mock crime situations where the characteristics of the “real” perpetrator are known. Drawing together the results of four of these studies in a meta-analysis published in 2007, Snook’s team found that the profilers did only slightly better than students without any experience of profiling, and that the predictive abilities of both were very low (Criminal Justice and Behavior, vol 34, p 437). (more)