Definition
Investigative psychology, developed by David Canter and colleagues from the late 1980s, is the systematic application of psychological theory and statistical methods to investigative problems — including offender characteristics inference, crime linkage, geographic prediction, suspect prioritisation, and interview strategy. It positions itself explicitly as the evidence-based alternative to intuition-driven profiling.
The defining move is to build models from data: large databases of solved crimes are used to test which combinations of crime-scene features actually predict offender characteristics, and with what reliability. Where classical FBI profiling sorted offenders into 'organised' and 'disorganised' types, investigative psychology asks which features co-occur, how stably, and over what behavioural dimensions.
Why it matters
How it works
A typical project: code a large set of solved offences along behavioural, spatial, and victim dimensions; use multidimensional scaling or latent-class analysis to discover stable patterns; test whether those patterns predict offender characteristics (age, criminal history, residential proximity); cross-validate on held-out data; deliver structured guidance to investigators rather than a single 'profile'.