BEHAVIORAL EVIDENCE ANALYSIS

The criminal profiling community can easily be split into two separate groups: those that have written criminal profiles and those that have not. It is an important distinction, because report writing is one of the most important requirements of good scientific practice. The process of writing up findings helps to reveal flaws in an examiner’s logic so that they can be amended or revisited; the final report memorializes findings and their underlying basis at a fixed point in time; and as a document a forensic report provides the best mechanism for transparency and peer review. The problem is that many criminal profilers have not written criminal profiles, and still more prefer that this remain the case, often to conceal their lack of methodology.

The contributors to this volume have travelled the world for more than a decade to lecture on the subjects of crime scene analysis and criminal profiling. The result has been a steady stream of requests from educational institutions and government agencies alike to teach the application of criminal profiling theory. Everyone has read the books, everyone has attended the lecture; but few have experience with hands on practice and application. In other words, there is a growing number of serious professionals who want to know how to put theory into practice and then learn what it means to put their findings into written form.

Behavioral Evidence Analysis: International Forensic Practice and Protocols has been written as a companion text to Turvey’s Criminal Profiling, now in its fourth edition. It is meant to provide the legion of instructors that are teaching criminal profiling as a subject with real world examples of case reports. It is also meant to serve as a desk reference for professionals that are writing crime scene analysis and criminal profiling reports, to enable sampling of structure, terminology, and references.