Criminal profiling is designed to generate information on a perpetrator of a crime, usually a serial offender, through analysis of the crime scene. The article examines the two main approaches to criminal profiling, crime scene analysis, and investigative psychology, for the presence of a paradigm and the possibility of falsifiability to determine whether they can be considered science. The article demonstrates that investigative psychology is more scientific than crime scene analysis, which is based mainly on experience and intuition of police officers and is not particularly amenable to testing. It suggests that the first step in creating a science of profiling would be to establish greater cooperation among organizations with an interest in the procedure. By having profiling data and theories readily available and open to peer review, police forces that do not have the resources or knowledge to develop profiling techniques of their own will have access to information that may help them. However, the article concludes, without some solid theoretical and empirical basis on which to build an offender profile, procedures now available are not much more useful than psychic visions. Notes, references