The development of geographical profiles is a powerful technique to support the investigation of serial violent crimes. This process analyzes locations related to a series of crimes to determine the most likely area in which the offender lives. Geographic profiling is based on the premise that the location of the crime site can provide the police with vital information to evaluate and predict the offender's most likely place of residence, workplace, social locations and travel routes. Thanks to films such as The Silence of the Lambs, many people associate criminal profiling with the methods and techniques developed by the FBI in Quantico's Behavioral Science Unit.
Theories about the crime pattern, routine activity, and rational choice provide the basis for understanding the target patterns and hunting behavior of criminal predators. Most likely, the initial hunt and criminal acts will occur relatively close to the location of the offender's home or workplace. Geographic profiling is a criminal investigation methodology that analyzes the locations of a series of connected crimes to determine the most likely area of residence of the offender. All certified geographic profilers are members of the International Criminal Investigation Analysis Fellowship (ICIAF), a professional profiling organization created by researchers trained by the FBI in the mid-1980s.
Large highways and highways play an important role in crime, simply because that's how criminals and victims are forced to travel. This information allows police departments to focus their investigative efforts, geographically prioritize suspects, and concentrate patrol efforts in areas where the criminal predator is likely to be active. Through numerous research studies, greater importance has been given to the trips that criminals routinely take to determine the spatial range of criminal activity. Consequently, criminal acts follow a distance-reducing function, so that the further away the space of usual activity is from an offender, the less likely they are to participate in predatory criminal activity.
The main geographical technique is a computerized system known as Criminal Geographic Targeting (CGT). It hopes to differentiate two types of serial offenders by studying the relationship between criminal spatial behavior and an offender's place of residence. Therefore, in relation to criminal activity, it follows that criminals must know a specific geographical area before starting to select which crimes they are going to commit; and when their movement patterns intersect within this geographical area, it will largely determine where they commit their crimes. Geographical profiling is a subtype of criminal or criminal profiling (the inference of characteristics from characteristics of crime). While it can be difficult to understand the science behind geographical profiling, it's easy to see how this approach can offer practical help in criminal investigations.
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