Brown, Pat

AMERICAN
INVESTIGATIVE CRIMINAL PROFILER

Pat Brown is a prominent investigative criminal profiler whose company, the Pat Brown Criminal Profiling Agency, specializes in providing scene analyses and behavioral profiling to defense attorneys, prosecutors, the judicial system, and to international clients. She is also the C.E.O. of The Sexual Homicide Exchange (SHE), which was created in 1996 in an effort to provide a broadened approach to police training , homicide investigation, criminal justice, advocacy, and community involvement. SHE provides pro bono (at no cost) investigative and criminal profiling services to the families of homicide victims, as well as to law enforcement agencies. A central focus of SHE is the investigation and profiling of cold case homicides.

Through SHE, Pat Brown is piloting the CAPTURE (Coalition for Apprehending Predators through Utilizing Resources Effectively) Program, a serial homicide investigation methodology and training program for law enforcement personnel, the goal of which is to increase the efficiency of homicide investigations and thereby increase the rate of serial killer arrests (and significantly decrease the number of serial killers at large).

As an investigative criminal profiler, Pat Brown makes herself (and her team of profilers) available to assist law enforcement agencies without charge. Although their profiling work may sometimes serve merely to validate the work of the ongoing homicide investigation and to provide reassurance to the families of victims that the criminal justice system is doing all it can to solve the crime, they can sometimes offer new ideas and provide alternative directions for the investigation to take. In suspected serial homicides, investigative profiling may be used to narrow investigative focus or, alternatively, to broaden the base of possible leads; it may be used as a tool for linking crimes together.

Brown views investigative criminal profiling as a dynamic process that does not conclude until a suspect is arrested and convicted. She deems it a support process for the criminal investigative team, made up of a combination of four skills: investigation, forensic analysis, psychological assessment, and the application of cultural anthropology. Brown considers this type of profiling to be a real-time, speculative process requiring ongoing checking to avoid missing any significant data, and should never be done in isolation, but rather as one piece of the entire criminal investigative process.

Pat Brown, through her commonsense, straightforward law enforcement training programs, her media commentary work, her development of the CAPTURE program, and the evolution of SHE, has done much to contribute both to the solution of cold cases and ongoing investigations.

see also Anthropology; Cold case; Crime scene reconstruction; Crime scene staging; Serial killers.