Connect to outside sources (article/book/podcast/ted talk/blog/website/etc)

• • This is a Text investigation. Consider your essential question in the context of at least two outside sources you have identified that connect to your essential question. How do these ideas resonate with or challenge your own beliefs, experiences, or practices? Be sure to give concrete and specific examples. You may want to address: ways the sources answered parts of your Essential Question, what additional questions were raised, or how your essential understanding of your project was altered or confirmed by the readings you did. Make sure to cite your sources.

Essential Questions: What makes a successful profile? What makes a successful application of a profile? What are the dangers of psychological profiling?

My first resource is the course The Psychology of Criminal Justice on Edx. I’ve learned a lot about the steps and approaches that psychological profilers can take. There’s a variety of them that can be applied and each one has its strengths. It’s especially interesting how they include some downfalls to some profiling methods (like how they might not work on all offenders or how it may not always be accurate). I really like this course because, alongside the lesson videos, the course also creates its own (fake) crime scene for the students to follow. I am able to use my own reasoning to apply what I know to the case. Although I don’t have as much expertise on how to use the methods, it’s still fun to use my own deductive reasoning to start to create a profile.

My second resource is more of a culmination of recourses like the documentary tv show on Netflix called the Unabomber in his Own Words and A Journey Into the Center of the Mind (III) by James Fitzgerald. At first, I pictured psychological profilers primarily using crime scene evidence to identify the offender. However, by learning about the Unabomber case I’ve learned that linguistic analysis can be just as important to creating a profile. The profiler Fitzgerald as well as other linguistic analysts were able to use pieces of the Unabomber’s writing to create a profile and then finally connect it to Ted Kacynski. Well, really what happened was that Kaczynski’s brother and his wife reached out to the FBI because they thought that Ted fit the profile. Letters and writing from Ted were then compared to the Unabomber’s manifesto and letters. It turned out the two were the same people and this finding led to authorities being able to get a warrant to Kacynski’s cabin to find more evidence.