Brown, in her biographic article for World of Forensic Science, states,
She views investigative criminal profiling as a dynamic process that does not conclude until a suspect is arrested and convicted. She deems it a support process for the criminal investigative team, made up of a combination of four skills: investigation, forensic analysis, psychological assessment, and the application of cultural anthropology. Brown considers this type of profiling to be a real-time, speculative process requiring ongoing checking to avoid missing any significant data, and should never be done in isolation, but rather as one piece of the entire criminal investigative process (Brown, ¶4).
Brown works 'pro bono' on several cold case file crimes, trying to be closure for the family.
The profilers use a variety of known characteristics to start the profile. The years of research done by early profilers such as Douglas has enabled the profilers to obtain clearer pictures of the mindset of the criminal. The crime scene, the evidence, and the characteristics provide a rough sketch for the profiler to utilize. Caution should be taken in the use of criminal profiles due to the fallibility and human error rate in the development of the profile. According to Snook, Gendrau, Craig, and Paul, in the magazine, Skeptic article, "Criminal Profiling," they conclude the following, "The sole reliance on trait-based models of profiling is fundamentally flawed. Criminal profilers do not seem to recognize that a consensus began to emerge in the psychological literature some 40 years ago that it was a mistake to rely on traits as the primary explanation for behavior" (Snook, Gendrau, Craig, and Paul, Putting CP to the Test Section, ¶3).
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