文件名称：PLACE, SPACE, AND POLICE
文件大小：259KB
文件格式：PDF
更新时间：2013-03-16 03:45:17
D. Kim Rossmo
Police investigations of serial murder, rape and arson can be assisted by a geographic perspective on the spatial behavior that led to the crime scene. For any crime to occur there must have been an intersection in both time and place between the offender and victim. How did this come to happen? What are the hunting patterns of predatory criminals? Environmental criminology and the routine activity approach provide a general framework for addressing these questions, and work in this area represents a practical application of theory to the real world of police investigation. By "inverting" research that has focused on relating crime places to offender residences, the locations of a series of crimes can be used to determine where an offender might reside. The probable spatial behavior of the offender can thus be derivedfrom information contained in the known crime-site locations, their geographic connections, and the characteristics and demography of the surrounding areas. By determining the probability of the offender residing in various areas, and displaying those results through the use of isopleth or choropleth maps, police efforts to apprehend criminals can be assisted. This investigative approach is known as geographic profiling.