The real-life Cracker - University of Huddersfield

He was responsible for introducing offender profiling to British police work. But don’t describe David Canter as “the real-life Cracker”…

It is true that police investigations have become more effective and our understanding of the criminal mind has become more profound thanks to the research of Professor Canter.

Now based at the University of Huddersfield, he is the pioneer of investigative psychology, a discipline which now spread around the world.

Perhaps the highest profile case to which David Canter made one of his earliest major contributions was that of the ‘Railway Rapist’ and serial killer John Duffy in 1986.  For the first time, British police made use of an offender profile drawn up by a psychologist.  But Prof Canter is quick to emphasise that investigative psychology is an academic discipline and he rejects the “Cracker” tag.

“It is very misleading to think that psychologists will ever solve crimes.  Crimes are solved by the police.  What we are doing is developing a new understanding of criminal behaviour and developing whole strategies and styles of carrying out what I call problem-solving research.”
 
The arrival of Professor Canter and his International Research Centre for Investigative Psychology at Huddersfield confirms the University as a major centre for research in criminology and forensics. David’s own massive archive of material from 40 years in the field of psychology, crime and law – including details of investigations - will be stored at the University as an important research resource.

In addition to continuing his own work, Prof Canter is supervising post-graduate research at Huddersfield into a wide variety of topics, including the relationship between personality and crime, eye-witness testimony and the pathways to radicalisation in Islamic jihadi groups.