Geographical profiling

• The locations where crimes are committed can reveal information about the profile of the offenders.

  Geographical profilers are concerned with where crimes take place, rather than who committed them. Location is the prime clue.
• This technique uses the location of the crime to make inferences about the likely home of the offenders or where they are based - crime mapping.

  It can be used alongside investigative psychology to create hypothesis about the offender and how they're thinking and their MO.
• and how they're thinking and their MO.

  The assumption is that serial offenders will restrict their crime to areas they are familiar with

  So understanding the spatial pattern of their behaviour provides profilers with a 'centre of gravity:

  The ‘centre of gravity' indicates the offender’s base, which is often in the middle of the spatial pattern. it also helps

  Profilers predict where an offender is likely to strike next- 'jeopardy's surface’.

  This is based on time, distance and movement to and from crime scenes.
• A strength of geographical profiling is that there is supporting evidence from a real life case study. John Duffy carried out 24 sexual attacks on women and three murders near railway stations in North London. After a conviction in 1988, it was confirmed that 12 out of the 17 characteristics in the profile by canter were accurate. This confirms that the bottom-up approach to offender profiling does have useful applications in fighting crime.
• weakness may not be sufficient on its own. success of geographical profiling may be reliant on the quality of data that police can provide. Unfortunately, recording of crimes is not always accurate, vary between police forces and an estimated 75% of crimes are not reported to the police in the first place. calls into question usefulness of an approach that relies on the accuracy of geographical data. Even if information is correct, critics claim other factors are as important in creating a profile. suggests that geographical information alone may not lead to successful capture of offender.