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Knowledge on corporate crime still lags behind its far‐reaching economic significance. In order to learn more about the motives of corporate criminals, qualitative psychological interviews were conducted with convicted offenders to identify the critical motives behind the crimes. In a quantitative analysis the offender profiles were then systematically compared and validated with the help of court records from public prosecutors' offices in Germany. The purpose of this paper is to gain insights into the complex interaction of emotional, motivational and cognitive processes leading up to the crime in order to draw possible conclusions for how best to prevent and combat white‐collar crime.

In order to learn more about the motives of corporate criminals, thirteen qualitative psychological interviews were conducted with convicted delinquents in various penitentiaries. The focus was on fraud, embezzlement, breach of trust and corruption. In addition, the court files of 60 corporate criminals from 11 German public prosecutors' offices were analysed systematically in order to evaluate pivotal motives and propitious conditions for criminal behaviour along with characteristic personality traits of the perpetrators.

Five different criminal psychological profiles were identified that enable a better understanding of the motives behind white‐collar crime. The key point is to gain insight into the complex interaction of emotional, motivational and cognitive processes that lead to a criminal act in order to derive possible consequences for preventing and combating white‐collar crime. The results of the study reveal extremely disparate delinquent types that demand a mix of preventive measures and an adequate compliance management framework.

The results of the study reveal extremely disparate delinquent types that demand a mix of preventive measures and an adequate compliance management framework.

All societies in the modern world are troubled by crime, and the general public is equally fascinated by criminals and fearful of criminal behaviour. In the United Kingdom, events such as the murders of Jack the Ripper, the Yorkshire Ripper and Harold Shipman, and the Soham tragedy, coupled with film and television programmes including Silence of the Lambs, Cracker and Crime Scene Investigation, have fuelled the public's consciousness of the criminal mind.In the fight against crime, the development of offender profiling by the FBI in the USA has further captured people's imagination. The technique was introduced to help law enforcement agencies solve serious crimes such as serial rape or murder, and to a lesser extent arson and property crime. At the heart of profiling lies the belief that by combining psychological principles with crime scene analysis, it is possible to identify the likely characteristics of a perpetrator.Although advances in crime detection are welcomed, the profiling field appears riddled with contradiction and disagreement. Social scientists argue that the discipline is unscientific due to methodologically weak research, while police officers appear sceptical about its benefits for solving crime. In Britain, profiling has witnessed both notable successes, for example Canter's profile of the serial rapist and murderer John Duffy, and dramatic failures, such as the Colin Stagg profile in the Rachel Nickell inquiry. This article reviews the offender profiling literature, examines its applicability in the legal system and identifies areas for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to construct a profile of a financial criminal, with special emphasis on their psychological attributes. The objective is to determine if such a profile can provide a valuable tool for detecting perpetrators of financial crime and for implementing risk-reduction strategies.

The approach involved a review of various personality disorders and other mental health issues, as well as an analysis of a number of cases involving serious financial crime, to ascertain whether the behaviour of the perpetrators was consistent with certain psychological challenges. In addition, the study examined various motivators for the commission of the financial crime.

The research revealed some key commonalities among the perpetrators of financial crime and that their behaviour was often consistent with that of a person afflicted with a personality or other psychological disorder.

The study provides a comprehensive analysis of various personality and other psychological challenges afflicting a number of offenders involved in financial crime. It also provides some critical findings that could be valuable for those charged with establishing measures to prevent and detect financial crime.

Early classification systems of fire setting have suffered from several limitations, including the lack of empirical validation and the focus mainly on the offender motivation behind this type of crime. More recent research shows that looking at the crime scene behaviors may present a more fruitful approach for helping to solve fire setting offenses. The purpose of this study is to advance current scholarship by developing a new typology of fire setting based on the combination of offender motive and crime scene behaviors.

Latent class analyses were used with a sample of 134 fire setters who committed 275 arsons from the Korean National Police Agency to identify distinct fire setter motivations and crime scene contexts. Chi-square and crosstabulation analysis were then conducted to determine whether crime scene behaviors were associated with distinct offender motives and vice versa. Lastly, to improve the external validity of each of the latent classes, chi-square analyses were performed using variables related to the fire setters' criminal history, sociodemographic characteristics and arson classification.

Five motive subtypes were identified as well as five distinct crime scene contexts in which serial fire setting occurs. A significant association among these classes suggests that it is possible to infer fire setters’ motive from crime scene behavior and vice versa.

This comprehensive typology of fire setters has potential for profiling of unknown offenders as well as for suspect prioritization in police investigations.

The specific aim of this paper is to explore the multi‐disciplinary academic antecedents of KM in order to better understand KM. By doing so, it is suggested that KM can be more effectively applied in real‐world situations, such as professional occupations.

The approach is conceptual: five core antecedents of KM – philosophy, sociology, psychology, computing and information systems, and management – are explored and associated with the criminal investigation process.

KM antecedents can be applied to the professional discipline of criminal investigation to create a conceptual model of knowledge management for the criminal investigative process. The model offers guidance on ways in which KM can be understood in terms of the criminal investigative process.

KM has been considered a somewhat nebulous subject, so there is value in exploring its multidisciplinary roots to gain a better understanding of it and how it can be more effectively applied in specific organizational or practitioner contexts.

By mapping the KM antecedents to the criminal investigation process a conceptual model has been developed, which it is believed could prove useful in helping police organizations, as well as academics studying the criminal justice system, to better understand the discipline of KM in the context of law enforcement‐related work.

While KM antecedents have been identified, the paper is one of the first to explicitly show how they can be used to link KM to real world situations – in this case the criminal investigative process.

The purpose of this article is to improve the use of evidence-based practice and research utilization in the offender profiling process. The use of offender profiling has been met with increasing resistance given its exaggerated accuracy. The “Investigative Journalist/Expert Field Micro Task Force” model, a collaborative method that incorporates offender profiling and is designed to address unresolved serial homicides, is introduced and evaluated alongside recommendations on attaining adherence.

The model was field tested in 17 instances. The measures used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to gauge the usefulness of their case consultations, whether their input helped catch the offender, offer new leads, move the case forward, provide new avenues or give new ideas, were used to evaluate the model.

The model established likely patterns of serial murder activity among strangulations of women in Chicago, Cleveland, and Panama and resulted in convictions of suspects in Louisiana and Kansas City. This model is valuable when used to parse modern-day offenders from those who committed unresolved homicides as the latter display different behaviors that can make investigations difficult endeavors. Results from the field tests mirror those from the literature in that profiling alone did not result in the capture of serial killers. Instead, profiling was used in conjunction with other efforts and mainly as a means to keep the investigation moving forward.

Unresolved homicides are at a point of crisis and represent a significant but largely unaddressed societal problem. The success of this model may compel law enforcement to restore faith in offender profiling.

The idea that criminal behavior is a function of the offender's personality, also called the Homology hypothesis, has a long history in forensic psychology and criminology. This assumption, however, has been decried as lacking empirical support. In spite of much social concern relative to sexual offenses, there is virtually no research looking at the stability of offending pattern in sex offenders of adult women. This paper aims to fill some of the gaps.

Latent structure analyses were conducted on a secondary dataset including 145 serial rapists. A cross‐sectional, discrete time‐series design was used including a sequence of three offenses.

Moderate support was found for the three main assumptions underlying the Homology hypothesis. Offenses tended to share a relatively similar underlying structure, with the victimology and aggression components being more prominent than the sexual dimension. The three primary profiles identified, labeled “Passive”, “Stranger‐aggressive”, and “Antisocial”, were found to be about 50 percent stable across the sequence. Finally, the presence of significant dysfunction in the family of origin predicted membership in the “Antisocial” class, as well as increased the specificity and stability of this profile. The presence of early maladjustment was not related to any of the states.

Based on the results, it is proposed that future research incorporates contextual‐environmental elements in order to increase the validity of the findings.

This study represents a unique attempt at documenting patterns of stability and variations across incidents of rape, using an institutional sample. Furthermore, it illustrates the use and potential benefits of latent structure models in criminological research.

This paper provides an overview of the role computer software plays within police forces with particular attention paid to crime analysis and investigation computer systems. A distinction is made between major crime (e.g. murder, violent assault, rape, etc.) and volume crime (e.g. domestic burglary, shoplifting, etc.). Illustrative systems that are in practical use for tackling both major and volume crime are described. Particular attention is paid to the attempts that have been made to apply artificial intelligence techniques to tackling the volume crime of burglary. A topic of current research is the use of data mining techniques for automatically detecting patterns in reported crimes. The paper concludes by looking at the problems and benefits such systems may bring.