Criminal profiling is often called Racial Profiling and is widely understood by the general public as the identification of alleged criminal activity based substantially or entirely upon a suspect's innate characteristics, such as skin color or ethnic appearance.

While this is also widely considered to be an outrageous mode of focusing law enforcement interest upon a given person, criminal profiling has a long history going at least as far back as the 1800's. Criminal anthropologists attempted to relate physical attributes of those who committed crimes to the crimes themselves.

But, to law enforcement criminal profiling may involve not the ethic or racial characteristics of a suspect, but the FBI even has Behavioral Sciences Unit whose primary goals include predicting patterns in serial cases, including homicide, rape, arson, sexual molestation, bombing, drug trafficking, terrorism, and ritually performed crimes.

Criminal profiling may identify the characteristics of individuals more likely to commit crimes. Generally, criminally profiling involves the quantification of a multiple markers, including psychological traits, physical traits, physical conduct, the habituation of placing oneself in a particular place, and a host of other quantifiable pieces of the profile puzzle.

While used to help predict what types of people may be more likely to commit a particular crime, criminal profiling may also be misapplied to innocent individuals who fit a particular and limited profile in some way.

Contrary to much public belief, race or the appearance of ethnic origin can be legally used as one component of a host of other characteristics law enforcement may use in their attempt to prevent a particular criminal act.

There are legal rights to prevent the use of criminal profiling, and protect individuals from false allegations based on limited criminal profiling. For more information on criminal profiling, please contact us to confer with an attorney.