How I Started Profiling Predators and Their Prey
The other day, a woman stopped me at a burger place near my house and asked, “When did you know you were going to be a profiler?” It was a difficult question, and I didn’t have a quick answer. I wish I could’ve told her that I woke up one night to a blinding light and a voice telling me what I was meant to do.
During my first years with the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (later called the Investigative Support Unit) in the late 1970’s, the word “profiling” hardly existed, not in the sense that it does now. I think it’s become a familiar concept to most people these days, thanks to my books those by my former associates, television shows, movies, and other media. But a lot of people have misconceptions about profiling—either an overblown sense that we close our eyes and magically “see” the crime we’re investigating as it occurred, or a restricted notion that all we do is create profiles of subjects who are unknown and at large.
