1. Offender profiling in road safety
10-15 minutes total. Me for 5-7 minutes
Tanya Fosdick

2. What is offender profiling?
We all know the way it is used in TV crime dramas like Cracker to track down serial killers, based on their characteristics, but is this how it works in practice? In the UK in the 1980s, leading investigative psychologist David Canter used information about crimes supplied by the police to suggest where the offender might live, what job they might do, the sort of life they live and their history of offending. His findings would allow police to narrow down their list of suspects, and he was remarkably accurate.

3. Profiling offenders
The geographical approach – looking at patterns in the location and timing of offences to make suggestions about where offenders might live and work
Investigative psychology – using established psychological theories to predict the characteristics of offenders
The typological approach – assigning offenders to different categories, based on the characteristics of crime scenes, with each category of offender having different types of characteristics
The clinical approach – using insights from psychiatry and clinical psychology to suggest whether an offender might be suffering from a mental illness

4. Profiling offenders in road safety
The geographical approach – offence data to understand offence location & home area. Link to socio-demographic data to understand who they are (deprivation, family composition, education, health etc.)
Investigative psychology – using existing research such as Fylan’s types of speeding driver and Christmas’s seven segments of motorcyclists
The typological approach – using the characteristics of the offence to understand the type of offender – drink-driver in town at 3pm on a Wednesday verses a low-level speeder on a motorway in the middle of the night – different?

5. Impaired by alcohol drivers by mosaic
Based on CFs from STATS19 & multilevel logistic regressions

6. Speeding drivers by mosaic
Based on CFs from STATS19 & multilevel logistic regressions

7. Camera casualties & offenders

8. Motorcyclists BikeSafe attendees RIDE disposals STATS19 FPN Data
Using a variety of sources to compare and contrast, based on the geographical and typological approaches

9. Ethical considerations
Can be controversial – links to ethnicity can cause issues?
Sensitivities – profiling potential victims?
Targeting some offenders and not others – procedural justice issue – seen as “not fair”?
Proportionality?
The question begs then “are there any ethical considerations in offender profiling in road safety?” Obviously, more widely it can be a controversial topic, especially when profiles are linked to ethnicity as have been the case for gang-related, drug or terror-related crimes.
I can think of one example where I wasn’t comfortable with profiling in road safety, but perhaps because it was too accurate. For many years, we have created ‘personas’ – the profile of a certain type of road user over-represented in crashes and/or road traffic offences. One of the personas I created and named (as it helps to visualise them if they are given an appropriate name) was for a young male driver. About a month after I shared the findings with colleagues, a young male with the same name killed himself and two passengers in a crash almost identical to that as identified as ‘typical’ in the analysis. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it – in some respects, it showed that the profiling ‘worked’ (even to the extent of getting the name correct) but on other hand, how would his family or the families of his passengers ever feel if the profile became public knowledge? Would they think that we could have done more to target him earlier and prevent the crash from occurring? Or was it just coincidence?

10. Over to you…. What profiling do you do? What sources do you use?
What are the ethical considerations in profiling (if any?)
How do we resolve them?