Behavioral Profiling and Human Judgment
Algorithms and machine learning undoubtedly have exciting and immense potential to empower law enforcement to combat violent crimes, but these tools must be used with careful consideration and transparency because they can also create mistrust among citizens who fear the dawning of a science fiction-inspired surveillance state policed by indifferent machines. Additionally, machine learning is not a substitute for the intuition that experienced police, profilers, and criminology researchers have gained through years of embodied experience about human aspects of violent crime like complex emotional responses, imaginative fantasies, and often aesthetic signatures.54 These complementary cautions suggest that the best implementation model should take advantage of the nearly unlimited processing power of computers to mine, organize, and map data while maintaining the primacy of human judgment in making decisions about how to deploy assets and about which individuals are likely to constitute authentic threats. A criminal profiling case study investigating a murderer’s Facebook page to determine his motive revealed the importance of professional experience and human intuition in understanding threats, motivations, and intentions.55 In this case, the cumulative evidence that a computer algorithm would have detected overwhelmingly supported a satanic ritualistic motive, but when the forensic investigator conducted an exhaustive review of the offender’s social media account he discovered buried clues indicating that the motive was actually to punish a pedophilic abuser.56
This case study illustrates the value of an emerging field in profiling and crime analysis called digital behavior analysis. Digital behavior analysis encompasses the investigation of digital criminal footprints using an amalgamation of traditional and novel methods to achieve goals like understanding motives, linking crimes of serial offenders, and designing offender typologies based on modus operandi, victim characteristics, and offender demographics and behaviors.57 Through the method of idiographic digital profiling, specialists can track a subject’s behavior across multiple websites, determine the true identities of
54 Nemanja Radojevic, Ivana Curovic, and Niodrag Soc, “Using a Facebook Profile in Determining the Motive of Homicide,” Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine 20 (2013): 575.
55 Ibid., 575-577.
56 Ibid., 577.
57 Chad M. Steel, “Idiographic Digital Profiling: Behavioral Analysis Based on Digital Forensics,” The Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law 9, no. 1 (2014): 7.
anonymous users, map a subject’s social network, evaluate the type and quantity of a subject’s social interactions, and track a subject’s physical movements using tools like geolocation.58 Innovative techniques like idiographic digital profiling are especially needful within the contemporary context of the digital transformation of traditional violent crime and ongoing public safety and peacekeeping challenges stemming from the global COVID-19 pandemic. These digital profiling methods will better equip law enforcement to counter the technologically advanced strategies used by many violent criminals by combining computing power and human judgment to exploit behavioral traces hidden in cyberspace. 59
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Misconstrual of Privacy in Cyberspace
- Demystifying True Online Threats vs. Protected Violent Speech
- Cyberspace is a Hunting Ground
- Shrinking Big Data
- Behavioral Profiling and Human Judgment
- Conclusion
- Bibliography