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Some excellent research issues are brought forth by Turvey. He points out some of the difficulties of gathering accurate data on the behaviors of serial offenders. The veracity of any Information gathered from the offenders themselves can be seriously questioned. Information gathered from public sources such as newspapers is also of questionable reliability. A third problem lies in the gathering of information from convicted criminals rather than by the successful offenders of sexual homicide who have eluded authorities. (p18,19). All of these concerns are certainly valid. On the other hand, research is rarely one hundred percent reliable. If the interests of catching killers, we have to take action with what resources and reliability we have at hand. Science always changes and perfection is not attainable.

Turvey makes the statement that inductive profiles are easily tossed together because of the lack of any actual analysis needing to be done (p. 19). The data is inputted and a profile is produced that is much like the other profiles produced. Although I disagree with Turvey's assessment of inductive profiling, I would agree that many a generic profile has been tossed out that merely describes the offender as being a loser....not much of a distinguishing feature. Finally, Turvey states that inductive profiling includes false premises that treat all offenders as a behaviorally identical group regardless of crime types, location, and time (p.20-21). While there is undoubtedly some research that has failed to make distinctions, properly conducted research is looking specifically to differentiate those behaviors. While it is true that each crime has certain unique behaviors attached to it, that same scene will have behaviors that are common to an identifiable group of people.

It is my opinion that one does indeed need to view each crime as unique in the totality of its elements. However, there are also similarities in offender behaviors that represent a subset of human behavior that is useful in the identifying suspects who commit specific types of crimes. Turvey states, however, that no two individuals are exactly alike and therefore no crime scene will be duplicated (p.30). While this may be true at some microscopic level, a whole lot of crime scenes look VERY much the same as there are only so many ways to kill a person and so many ways to have sex with them. Many offenders do behave in a relatively similar fashion and many of their crime scenes would be difficult to distinguish from another's. For this reason, profiling can only narrow down the suspect list; it can't pick someone out of it.

Turvey then does an interesting turnaround at this point in his book. He goes on to say that the deductive method of criminal profiling is not wholly scientific because we are attempting to interpret human behavior! In fact, he declares that the deduction of offender characteristics is "still considerably artful"! (p.31-32) I wonder how many erroneous conclusion artful deductive profiles arrive at as they attempt to interpret human behavior from the evidence at hand. Then just a statement away, Turvey says "Discard any offender characteristics that are unsupported by the physical and behavior evidence and retain those that are." Turvey himself has a difficult time not conjuring up scenarios that have no basis in fact any more than some inductive profilers have come under his fire for. In the WM3 profile he declares the killer to be unemployed. Considering the "fact" as he stated in his profile that the victim were killed just before dawn, there is no evidence to say he is unemployed, only Turvey personal viewpoint that the offender lacks patience and skill in the commission of the crime. While I have no objection to Turvey using a certain amount of logic about the transference of real life behavior to the crime scene, I find it interesting how Turvey offers this unsupported offender characteristic as it violates his own rules of deductive profiling. It is a rule Turvey breaks time and time again.

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