Geographical profiling is the process of determining the most likely residence of an offender who is suspected to be involved in a serial crime by evaluating locations of all crimes listed (Canter, 2008). As mentioned, it is mainly engaged in a series of crimes including rape cases, bombings, robbery, and arsons. Geographical profiling is primarily associated with Kim Rossmo who began its study as a result of the Brantingham model which holds that everyone has an ‘activity place’ in connection with where they live, study, work and carry out other daily activities. This space produces a particular pattern of movement. He related this to criminal activities and maintained that offenders must know the geography connected to the crimes they intend to carry out. This leads to a certain way of movement that predicts where the offense is likely to take place next. For this reason, geographical profiling is essential and efficient in criminal investigations.

Geographical profiling helps criminal investigators in prioritizing suspects according to their addresses; in some cases, many suspects are scaling to hundreds and thousands. Use of a geographical profile would be imperative in managing such situations (Canter, 2008).  It is also helpful in the fact that it uses fewer resources and gets to suspects within a short amount of time with fewer victims involved. A geographic profile is a map that uses color to indicate the most probable locations… They can use it to establish priorities of records in police custody like jail files, arrest records and other documents of field investigations. Such data may contain addresses, prior crimes and arrests and others may even include vehicles registration information.

A geographical profile can also help criminal investigators in choosing areas of patrols. This is mainly important when an offender is conducting their crimes within a short period. Also, it is used in placing specific tools like cameras and license plate readers to collect data on the movement of people and cars in a neighborhood. The information obtained can be reviewed later and investigated (Van der Kemp, 2008)

An example of a situation where it was used, is in Irvine city from around 2010 to 2011. The case involved several arsons that were suspected to be conducted by one person. A geography profile was made, and it was established that the fires all occurred in the early morning hours and a single neighborhood. People who resided in that area who had been priory arrested for arsons were reviewed, but the offender was not among the listed. Unburned materials recovered during the fires were DNA tested. Three pieces of evidence were found to contain genetic information from one person, a lady. The geo profile map was used to show the crime forecast with statistics of the previous fires and prediction of the most likely day the next explosion would occur. After a few weeks, one of the detectives identified a woman who was walking during the morning hours and smoke coming from behind her. He put the fire out, followed the lady and arrested her.  Though it does not solve the cases directly, geographical profiling helps produce spatial information and dramatically assists in managing large volumes of data.

References

Canter, D. V., & Young, D. (Eds.). (2008). Applications of geographical offender profiling. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Canter, D. (2004). Geographical profiling of criminals.

Van der Kemp, J. J., & Van Koppen, P. J. (2008). Fine-tuning geographical profiling. In Criminal Profiling (pp. 347-364). Humana Press

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