David Canter

David Victor Canter is a British psychologist, emeritus professor at the University of Liverpool, who pioneered the field he named investigative psychology, applying empirical psychological methods to criminal investigation and offender profiling. In the mid-1980s he worked with British police on the Railway Rapist case to produce one of the first systematic psychological offender profiles used in a major criminal investigation, and he later formalized investigative psychology as an evidence-based, theoretically grounded approach to analyzing criminal behavior. Over his career he has advised on more than one hundred police investigations and provided expert testimony, primarily for the defense.