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Throughout my career as an FBI agent and criminal profiler, I've often been asked,

what exactly is a profile and how are they created?

Profiling is part science, part art.

The science part employs statistics the Bureau has compiled from thousands of violent crimes as well as

interviews with offenders themselves. But obviously, there's way more to creating a criminal

profile of an unknown suspect than just statistics. If that was how to do it, a computer

could take the place of an experienced profiler.

The term profiler is really less of an FBI term and more of a pet name given by the media for agents certified in crime scene analysis at Quantico.

And I found that it's interchangeable both to the media and

the general public as well. For that reason, I use the term profiler in my title as it allows

people to better understand what I do. I profile unknown offenders of violent crimes.

Profilers use psychology, behavioral, and crime scene analysis, as well as information gleaned from the autopsy and police reports to analyze the what, when, where, and how of the attack.

We scrutinize even the most minute details to see if they suggest a pattern or offer a

useful clue as to the offender's personality.

By comparing the attack to similar crimes committed in the same way,

profilers can pull out the most common characteristics of those known offenders to create a

personality and lifestyle sketch of the unsub or unknown subject of the investigation at hand.

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