Contemporary Challenges in Investigative Psychology: Revisiting the Canter Offender Profiling Equations

A quarter of a century ago the FBI drew attention to what investigators have long known: Deductions about the likely perpetrator can be drawn from a consideration, in detail, of the crime itself (Douglas et al., 1986). Although thrown into high relief much earlier in the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, the FBI drew particular attention to this process and gave it the label ‘Offender Profiling’. Coming from a scientifically grounded psychological perspective, David Canter saw that the process being alluded to was a rather more profound one and, as a first step in unpacking this, tried to specify the central question that was being implied by the profiling process. This led him to the assertion that the relationship between actions and characteristics was one that, in mathematical terms, should be represented as a canonical form (Canter, 1993).