Introduction
- Geographic profiling is a criminal investigative technique that attempts to provide information on the likely “base of operations” of offenders thought to be committing serial crimes. The base of operations could be the offender’s home, place of employment, a friend house, or some other frequented location. The predictions are based on the locations of these crimes, other geographic information about the case and the suspect, and certain assumptions about the distance offenders will travel to commit crimes.
Insights
· Most crimes occur in relatively close proximity to the offender’s home.
· Crime trips follow a distance-decay function, with the number of crime occurrences decreasing with distance from the offender’s home.
· Juvenile offenders exhibit less mobility than adult offenders
· Patterns in crime trip distances vary by crime type.
Applications
· suspect and tip prioritization
· address-based searches of police record systems
· patrol saturation and surveillance
· canvasses and searches
· mass DNA screening prioritization
· department of motor vehicle searches
· zip code prioritization
· information request mail-outs
Geographic profiling represents an important step in moving computerized crime mapping beyond static displays of crime locations (electronic “pin maps”) and toward more analytical mapping that help analysts interpret spatial data.
For more information visit – http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/gp.pdf
