Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Offender profiling is an investigative tool used to narrow down the range of potential suspects for a crime by predicting the personality, behavioural, and demographic characteristics that an offender is likely to possess, based on information collected at the crime scene. While offender profiling has been popularized by TV shows and movies such as Criminal Minds, Silence of the Lambs, and Mindhunter, the accuracy and real-world impact of offender profiling is largely unknown. This book discusses the history of offender profiling, summarizes research on offender profiling methods, and reviews offender profiling evaluations of accuracy and applied impact. This book also describes a promising new offender profiling methodology called EvidenceBased Offender Profiling (Fox & Farrington, 2012, 2015). This new method relies upon empirical data and scientific methods to develop, evaluate, and replicate offender profiles, thereby increasing offender profiling's accuracy and utility for active police investigations. It uses prior information about statistical regularities between types of offenders and types of offenses to predict the characteristics of offenders in unsolved cases"-- Provided by publisher.