Battle Axe, invoking mom’s apple pie... hmm... pretty smooth advocacy there.
Malcolm Gladwell (of “Blink” and “Tipping Point”) has this on the FBI’s profiling in The New Yorker:
“Dangerous Minds: Criminal Profiling Made Easy,” New Yorker, November 12, 2007
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/12/071112fa_fact_gladwell
“A profile isn’t a test, where you pass if you get most of the answers right. It’s a portrait, and all the details have to cohere in some way if the image is to be helpful. In the mid-nineties, the British Home Office analyzed a hundred and eighty-four crimes, to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That’s just 2.7 per cent, which makes sense if you consider the position of the detective on the receiving end of a profiler’s list of conjectures.”