In Gladwell's "Dangerous Minds," he is extremely skeptical of the usefulness and accuracy of criminal profiling. An argument he makes relates criminal profilers to psychics because Douglas is called a psychic from a police officer, and Douglas is amused at the assumption. An argument Gladwell makes is when he tells that Brussel's profile wasn't even correct the first times he made it and that he never even said the Mad Bomber of New York was of Slavic descent; he claimed he was from Germany. Gladwell also goes on to tell us about each of the three profiles made by different professionals of the BTK killer; the profiles are extremely vague and each contradict each other. So Gladwell leaves us to wonder why we should rely on criminal profiling if there's no certainty or apparent validity to it.
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