Perfil del incendiario forestal español: aplicación del perfilamiento criminal inductivo.

The criminal profiling, understood as the process of inferring identifying offender features by analyzing evidences from the crime scene, has been criticized for its doubtful scientific nature, along with its lack of theoretical and empirical support. However, at present a model has emerged that works on the professionalization of the analysis of criminal behavior in police forces, through a rigorous application of the psychological knowledge to the criminal investigation. This line of working, initiated by Canter, involves the multivariate statistical application to solved criminal acts, thereby creating typologies (inductive profiling). Thus, it is possible to see if there are types of people most likely to commit certain sort of events. In this paper, a two-stage cluster analysis is used in a sample of 117 fires occurred in 2011. The results show five types of fire profiles. This model would show consistence with the results of previous years, and it is easily interpretable by police officers so that it could be used to new fires when the identity of perpetrators is unknown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]