Undoubtedly all of us at some point in our lives have read adventure and mystery books and of course, all or at least a majority of us know the famous British detective, Sherlock Holmes, who owes his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hundreds of adventures. next to his faithful friend John Watson. This famous detective who used his prodigious and brilliant mind to solve crimes; It is not the only one in the literature, there are also a couple more, called; Hercule Poirot, whom the writer Agatha Christie endowed with great skills and incredible cunning and we must not forget Auguste Dupin, a character created by Edgar Allan Poe who, like the previous ones, is also an astute detective.
But what does it have to do with criminal profiling? Well, simple, these characters were ahead of their time, since at that time science and technology were not as advanced as what we know today, so putting in context, these characters were ahead of their time, by taking the future of research criminal to new levels where they argued that crimes could be studied, using human behavior as a basis. Theories that probably inspired hundreds of police officers to find out more about how useful it would be to use and apply the methods suggested in the literature.
Now if we put it this way, the criminal profiling begins in these pages, where the investigators / characters used their methods to solve the crime or the mystery, aided by their skills, which despite the fact that these were fictitious, in the books were spot on; which I do not doubt that these have been a source of inspiration for what we now call criminal profilers.
Like the characters in these books, criminal profilers must be characterized by having a certain level of skepticism, referring to the fact that everything must be scientifically verified and corroborated before issuing an opinion; A fact that must not be lost sight of is that these analyzes began in the fields of psychology, not in law and obviously not in criminology, therefore criminology students go through these subjects that will provide the tools that in a future could be of great use in the aid of justice. These merely curious data help us to visualize the vast and vast field that criminal profiling has to offer and that still continues to change and evolve over the years.