Geographical Profiling

PROFESSOR LOUISE ALMOND

Thanks to Dr Freya O’Brien

for these resources
 Before you continue….

 We deal with extremely sensitive topics within this lecture,

 Please note that the lecture series will contain a
discussions of physical violence, and sexual violence.
 Please consider whether you will be potentially distressed by
participating in this lecture
 Please consider whether you need to attend or listen to specific
parts of this material if you think you may become distressed by
any of the material within them.
 Contact me lalmond@Liverpool.ac.uk during working hours if
you need direction to appropriate services
 Key contacts

24-hour National Domestic Violence

Freephone Helpline
0808 2000 247

The University Counselling

Service

https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/stu
dentsupport/counselling/

advice@liverpool.ac.uk, or call 0151

795 1000 between 9 am and 5 pm
Monday to Friday and speak to a
Wellbeing Advisor or you can speak to
your Learning and Teaching Support
Officers (LTSO) and the academic advisors
in your academic schools.
Key contacts

https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-help/

Merseyside Centre: Men and women

http://www.rasamerseyside.org
rasa@rasamerseyside.org
Helpline: 0151-666-1392
Helpline Opening Hours:
Tuesday 6-8pm, Thursday 6-8pm, and Friday 12-2pm

https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/studentsupport/sexualassault/
Sexual Assault Referral Centre
http://www.safeplacemerseyside.org.uk/
0151 295 3550
Open 24 hours
At the end of this session, you will be able to:

Define the term ‘geographical profiling’ and describe

it’s current status in the UK
Outline 3 theories that seek to explain offenders’
spatial behaviour
Explain ‘domocentricity’ and the commuter/marauder
model
List main empirical findings from ‘journey-to-crime’
research, explain the ‘least effort principle’ and
‘distance decay’
Critically evaluate geographical profiling systems and
journey to crime research
 Group task

What are the main ways we learn our way around

places?

How might resources of time, transport and

knowledge influence where offenders carry out their
crimes?
 Geographical Profiling

Geographical Profiling is the investigative process of predicting

the most likely ‘home’ location of an unknown offender,
based on the geographical location of their crimes

This process can come in the form of advice to the police or by

employing Geographical Profiling Systems (software) to
produce maps indicating where police should focus their
resources

These predictions are based on a wealth of research into

offenders’ spatial behaviour and theories that seek to
explain their ‘journey to crime’
 Geographical Profilers in the UK (1)

The Serious Crime Analysis Section (SCAS) employs

Geographical Profilers to assist nation-wide police
forces
Single cases and series
Murder, rape and sexual assault, indecent exposure,
arson, robbery, burglary, criminal damage
Locating fugitives, likely body disposal sites
https://mobile.twitter.com/nca_uk/status/88666046
0291923969
 Geographical Profilers in the UK (2)

Geographical Profilers will examine (using police data

and witness statements):
 Locations of offences
 Local topography
 Distance between offences
 Availability of suitable targets at offence locations
 Movements of offender and victim BEFORE and AFTER the
offence
 Temporal factors
 Body disposal sites
 Whether a vehicle was used
 Local transport networks
 Geographical Profilers in the UK (3)

Geographical profilers will advise on the most likely

locations (home or other anchor points) of the
offender (fugitive, body)

This is useful for prioritising areas for:

 Searches
 DNA screens
 House-to- house enquiries
 Surveillance operations
Historical foundations

ENVIRONMENTAL CRIMINOLOGY
 Cartographical studies (1)

André-Michel Guerry (1833)

 Examined large aggregated samples of property and violent offence
locations in areas of France
 These were clustered in specific areas
 Non-random distribution
 The risk of property and violent crime differed area-by-area
Adolphe Quételet (1842)
 Worked alongside Guerry
 Mapped crime alongside other social factors
 Patterns in crime reflected different social variations
 Also mapped the home locations of ‘beggars’ , ‘smugglers’ and
‘strumpets.’
 Cartographical studies (2)
Henry Mayhew (1862)
 Pockets of offenders living
in ‘rookeries’ (slums) in
London
 These were areas of high
social deprivation often
frequented by prostitutes
and criminals
 Offenders where living just
outside the City of London
police jurisdiction
 Offenders were travelling in
to the City to offend, in © Green & Parton, 1990
order to avoid detection Source: Mayhew, 1861)
 Sociological studies
Chicago School of
Sociology (Burgess, 1925;
Shaw & McKay, 1942)
 Mapped crime in Chicago
 Found that juvenile
delinquents lived in
particular parts of the city
 These areas which had
particular characteristics
 Zone 2: Transitional zone

Burgess (1925)
Environmental Criminology

ROUTINE ACTIVITY THEORY

RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY
CRIME PATTERN THEORY
 Routine Activity Theory (Cohen & Felson, 1979)

Offenders will come across opportunities to offend as

part of their routine activities
 Travelling, socialising, working, offending

People can also become victims as part of THEIR

routines activities

Emphasis on the convergence of timing and place on

the occurrence of crime
 3 necessary components

A motivated offender
 For example, a rapist, burglar, shoplifter
A suitable target
 For example, a rape victim, a house, a shop
 Suitability (Felson, 2002)
 Valuable and desirable to the offender
 Visible
 Easy to access and to escape from
 Inert
The absence of a capable guardian
 For example, witnesses, Neighbourhood Watch, CCTV
 Rational Choice Theory (Cornish & Clarke, 1986)

Emphasises the
importance of offenders’ Costs
decision making within (Apprehension,
crimes, rather than effort)
opportunity

Even the most impulsive

crimes involve a certain Benefits
element of rationality (Monetary gain,
sexual
gratification)
 Rational Choice Theory and The Environment

The environment has “choice structuring properties”

(Beauregard et al., 2007a, p.450; Cornish, 1993)

Decisions made throughout the commission of the

crime are governed by cues emitted by the
environment
 Before, during and after the crime
 Beauregard, Rossmo & Leclerc (2007a)

Interviewed 69 serial sex offenders imprisoned in

Canada
Offenders gave an account of their decision making
within the offences, which included a description of
their choice of:
 Hunting field
 Attack location
 Crime location
 Victim release location
At each location, most offenders could recall the
choices they made in relation to the environment
 Examples of rational choices (Beauregard et al, 2007a)

Hunting field
 An offender described how he would offend when children
were at day care, as they were “available and vulnerable”,
whereas “Parks and schoolyards demanded too much effort
and was too risky because anything could happen.” (p.453).

Attack location
 “I always hung out in the woods near the bike path, plenty of
people went through there because it was a shortcut. I noticed
that women used the path too.”
 Crime Pattern Theory

Incident Clusters

 Behaviours. Certain behaviours are common to the incidents.

 Places. Certain places can be common to incidents.
 Persons. Certain individuals or groups of people can be common to
incidents.
 Times. Certain times can be common to incidents.

Clustering of Crime/Criminals
 Repeat offenders. focusing on different targets at different places
 Repeat victims. repeatedly attacked by different offenders at
different places
 Repeat places. (or “hot spots”) involving different offenders and
different targets interacting at the same place
 Crime Pattern Theory (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1981)

Crimes are not randomly distributed because of:

 Environmental ‘backcloth’
 Opportunity
 Routine activities

Offenders have an internal awareness space (or

mental map) of the environment
 Humans hold internal representations or schemas to help
them understand their environment (Bartlett, 1932; Lynch,
1960)
 Mental maps

LIVERPOOL CITY CENTRE

 MENTAL MAPS

Mental maps or awareness spaces do not look like ‘real’

maps, but are distorted by experience, shaped by routine
activities
Individual’s become more familiar with novel surroundings,
mental maps change and become more complex
 Nodes (the places that people travel to and from, e.g. home base)
 Paths (routes between nodes)
 Edges (boundaries which delineate between familiar and non-familiar
areas)
Offenders select targets according to their internal
awareness space
 For example, choosing a house to burgle along a road (path) between
their house and their partner’s house (nodes)
 Burglars mental maps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7VC2Z5-0g8
 Comparisons with RAT, RCT and CPT

Offending is shaped by routine activities (all)

Offenders weigh up costs and benefits (CPT & RCT)
Decision-making may not be entirely rational (more
opportunistic in RAT)
 The environment may ‘leak’ cues prompting the offender to
offend, rather than the offender actively seeking out situations
within which to offend
All theories begin to explain:
 The reasons for the distribution of crime
 How offenders travel to and make decisions about where to
offend
 Domocentricity
The home location governs
offenders’ spatial behaviour

Amir (1971) and LeBeau

(1987a) found that rapists
often operate from a fixed
base, quite central to their
offences
 Commuter versus marauder model

Canter & Larkin (1993) studied a sample of 45 serial

rape offenders
Commuters
 Make trips to offend outside of the area within which they live
Marauders
 Commit crimes in areas within which they live
 In an area circumscribed by their offences
Highest proportion of offenders are usually marauders
Replicated in various studies for various crime types
 Tokyo (Tamura & Suzuki, 2000); USA (Warren, Reboussin,
Hazelwood, Cummings, Gibbs, & Trumbetta, 1998)
Windscreen wiper effect
 Jack the ripper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCdskRH-B6s
 Journey to crime

‘Journey to crime’ is the distance travelled by an

offender to commit crimes

Usually measured from their home base to the crime

location

Offenders do not usually travel far to commit

offences
 Empirical findings of ‘journey to crime’ research

UK: Canter & Larkin (1993) serial rapists travelled

on average 1.53 miles; Newman (2011) stranger
rapists travelled a mean distance of 2.91 miles
 USA: Rhodes and Conly (1981) serial rapists 1.15 miles; LeBeau
(1987a) non-serial rapists 3.5 miles
Least effort principle (Zipf, 1949)
 From biology, humans and animals will naturally choose the
path of ‘least effort’
 Therefore, if offenders can offend close to home, they will
 Distance decay
The further away the offender goes from home, the
less likely they are to offend

Turner (1969)

Linear
Across samples (Levine, 2002)
Negative exponential Different types of offenders (Hammond & Youngs, 2011)
Quadratic
Journey to crime of stranger rapists (Newman 2011)

384 offenders, distance from

Home location to attack location

Journey-to-crime distances
herein ranged from 0.1km to
573.2km, with a median
distance of 2.1km (about 10
min walk)
Just distances
0.1-10.1
N=322 (84% cases)
 Does Buffer zone exist? (Ward 2016)

459 stranger adult female rape cases committed

across the United Kingdom between 2003 and 2015
SCAS data
Euclidian distances
Examine both distance from offenders home to
Initial approach location and Attack location
 Initial approach location

 Range 0 to 573.20km
Median of 1.6km and a mean of 12.20km (SD =
45.04).
32 (7%) were distance of 0 i.e. in the offenders home
A quarter (26.8%) initially approached the victim
within 0 - 0.5km of their home, 50% less than 1.6 km
 Only 13.5% of initial approaches were 10km or
further from the offender’s residence.
 Attack location

Range 0 to 573.20Km
Median of 1.4km and a mean of 11.54 (SD = 44.12)
93 (20.3%) recorded an attack location of 0km
(therefore, within the offender’s home)
Over a quarter of distances were in the range of 0km
to 0.02km (27%),
Half less than 1.4km
Only 12.8% of distances indicated that the attack
location was 10km or further from the offenders’
home
So no evidence of buffer zone in
rape cases
 Urban versus Rural

Almond, McManus, Hankey, Trevett and Nee (2022)

Geographic Profilers rely on relatively generic JTC

research to form inferences about the likely distance
travelled by an offender, and may be missing the
opportunity to make a more bespoke assessment
which takes these factors into account.

Why may offenders travel different distances in

Urban/Rural areas?
 Study 1-Stranger sexual assault

1,186 cases of female stranger sexual assault

Initial contact location was significantly further from
an offender’s residence compared to the sexual
assault and victim release location
Initial approach location did not differ according to
population density (5 levels), or whether the location
was urban or rural.
Rapists were found to travel significantly further
from their home to a) attack their victim and b)
victim release in low population density and rural
areas
 Study 2-Homicide

124 cases stranger homicide

Initial approach location did not differ according to
population density (5 levels), or whether the location
was urban or rural.
 Murder location did not differ according to
population density (5 levels), or whether the location
was urban or rural.
Homicide offenders travelled significantly further
from their home to dispose of their victims body in
low population density areas and rural areas
 Factors that influence journey to crime

Age of the offender = shorter distances

Criminal experience = longer distances
Crime type = crimes against the person = shorter
distances
Urban areas = shorter distances
Vehicle = longer distances
Stranger victims = longer distances
Higher value goods = longer distances
 Evaluation of ‘journey to crime research’

Offenders may use other starting points

Offenders may be transient
Only known if the offence is solved
Different ways of measuring JTC
 ‘As the crow flies’ (Euclidean distances)
 Manhattan distances
 Wheel distances
This could mean findings are over- or under-
estimating distance
Ecological fallacy
Five aspects of offenders’
spatial behaviour?
 Summary of offenders’ spatial behaviour

Offenders do not usually travel far to commit crime

Their spatial behaviour is shaped by their experience
Different characteristics of the offender or the crime
can influence offenders’ spatial behaviour
The offender can operate from their home base
Spatial behaviour can be modelled

THEREFORE: this information can inform predictions

of where the offender lives, based on the locations of
their crimes
 Geographical Profiling

What we know about offenders’ spatial behaviour

can be used to predict the area within which they
live, based on the locations of their crimes

Kind (1987) used the centre of gravity of a series of

offences (which is the minimum possible distance
from each of the offences) to predict the home of
Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper)
 Geographical Profiling Software

Often work on distance decay/gravitational models

Use mathematical models to assign weightings to
each of the locations around a crime (in terms of
their likelihood of containing the base of the
offender)
These are combined for all the offences in the series
to produce a prioritised map of the area to search
Dragnet (Canter)
Rigel (Rossmo)
Crime StatIII (Levene)
Geographical Profiling Obscene Phone Calls
(Ebberline, 2008)
 Evaluation of Geographical Profiling Systems

 Small amount of studies that show that Geographical Profiling

Studies are effective (Paulsen, 2006)
 These have been carried out by the GPS developers themselves
 Snook, Canter & Bennell (2002) “Its no riddle pick the middle”
found that students were just as good at predicting the home
location of serial offenders as Dragnet
 Offenders have to be marauders
 What about offenders who commit crimes in their own homes?
 Have to be sure offences are linked in the first place
 Some GPS do not take topography and road networks into
consideration
 Summary

 Geographical Profiling is the investigative process of predicting

the most likely ‘home’ location of an unknown offender, based
on the geographical location of their crimes
 Crime and offender home locations have been mapped for years,
showing it is not randomly distributed
 There are several key ideas from environmental
criminology which help us understand offenders’ spatial
behaviour
 Offenders do not usually travel far to commit offences, but
there are factors that influence JTC and research has it’s
limitations
 Software is used to help with the geographical profiling
process; this too has it’s limitations
Any questions?