David Canter

David Victor Canter (born 5 January 1944) is a psychologist. He began his career as an architectural psychologist studying the interactions between people and buildings, publishing and providing consultancy on the designs of offices, schools, prisons, housing and other building forms as well as exploring how people made sense of the large scale environment, notably cities. He set up the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 1980. His work in architecture led to studies of human reactions in fires and other emergencies. He wrote about investigative psychology in Britain. He helped police in 1985 on the Railway Rapist case. He was the professor of psychology at the University of Surrey for ten years, where he developed investigative psychology described in detail in Investigative Psychology: Offender Profiling and the Analysis of Criminal Action and a course curriculum. He set up and was director of the Centre For Investigative Psychology, which is based at the University of Liverpool. From 2009 he was at the University of Huddersfield, where he directed the International Research Centre in Investigative Psychology. He retired from there in 2018. He is emeritus professor at the University of Liverpool and continues to publish in environmental and crime/forensic psychology.

Canter was a pivotal figure in the creation of the British, 'bottom-up', approach to profiling. This approach uses the evidence left at the crime scene and witness testimony to create a profile of the offender to help with criminal investigations.