Artigo

The utilization of forensic science and criminal profiling for capturing serial killers
John H. White, David Lester *, Matthew Gentile, Juliana Rosenbleeth
The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Jim Leeds Road, Pomona, NJ 08240-0195, United States
The concept of serial killing has become the focus of numerous true crime and fictional novels, television programs, movies, and various other forums that both entertain and inform the public.
Taking the lead are stories about criminal profiling and, more recently, the almost magical contribution of forensic science. There appears to be at least two types of perception regarding criminal profiling and forensic science – the public perception and the law enforcement perception.
The public’s perception of criminal profiling based on procedural information gleaned from television dramas like Profiler and
Criminal Minds is most likely inaccurate, even though the historical facts about serial killers appear to be correct most of the time in
Criminal Minds. However, ideas about who killed whom does not come to the criminal profiler in flashes of insight, nor does a group of FBI profilers fly around the country in a Lear jet and solve heinous murders within a few days with the help of a computer genius back in Quantico who seemingly has unlimited resources and who admittedly conducts illegal hacking into data banks that are highly confidential.
A similar public misperception may hold true relative to the efficacy of forensic science. Television viewers are barraged almost nightly with fictional shows that depict l police department crime laboratories that are filled with handsome men and beautiful women who gather evidence from the field and then analyze it themselves with state-of-the-art equipment. Not only do selfserving conflicts of interest emerge (the person who finds the evidence analyzes the evidence for its probative value), but also the procedures in these shows are full of errors.