Geographic Profiling in Criminology

Geographic Profiling (GP)

• The majority of sexual aggressors commit their crimes in a nearby area, making it easier for the police to develop police persecution techniques and strategies, including the GP.
• The GP is a technique for analyzing the geographic behavior developed by the criminal and his decision-making at a spatial and temporal level in order to advise police investigators.
• The main objective of GP is to identify a geographical area with a high probability that the offender's base of operations is located within it, which is called the anchor point.

Anchor Point

• The anchor point is usually the offender's residence, but it can also be his place of work, a friend's house, or a relative's, among others.
• This information about the probable place of residence can help the police to track possible suspects in the area through police databases.

Criminal Action Zone

• The GP can also provide the identification of the criminal action zone, an area where there is a greater probability that he will look for new victims and act again.
• The police can optimize patrol zones and search strategies in a specific area of the city based on this information.

Geographic Profiling Software

• The GP has led to the development of a sub-discipline within criminological profiling and the creation of specific geographic profiling software.
• This software tries to offer information on the criminal's area of action, their movement characteristics, temporal-spatial patterns, and, at best, information about where the offender may reside.

Theoretical Bases

• The theoretical bases of the GP arise mainly from the contributions of Environmental Criminology and various lines of research such as the Journey to Crime.
• These studies have shown that criminals tend to move very little to commit their crimes and that sex offenders tend to act mostly very close to where they live.

Consistency and Ritual

• The consistency of criminal behavior suggests that the criminal behaves with his victim in the same way as he behaves with other people in his non-criminal life.
• The ritual will also allow us to outline motivational and psychological aspects of the perpetrator of the crime, which can help investigators filter or search for suspects.

Geographical Behavior

• The crime takes place in a specific space, a place with a series of characteristics and conditions with which the criminal must interact and that force him to make a series of decisions and perform certain behaviors.
• The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and certain mathematical algorithms can help to carry out calculations and predictive models regarding the mobility and geographical activity of a criminal.

Modus Operandi (MO)

• The MO is the way in which a crime has been committed, including the actions and behaviors aimed at committing the crime.
• The MO can be categorized as low-risk or high-risk, depending on the level of planning and skill involved.

Signature

• The signature of the criminal can be defined as those behaviors that tell us about the final motivation to commit the crime, revealing the psychological or emotional needs that the criminal intends to cover by committing his crimes.
• The signature is more static than MO behaviors and is maintained even if the MO changes.

Crime Scene

• The crime scene is the space where the crime takes place and where the victim and perpetrator interact.
• The crime scene is the only element that remains, allowing us to reconstruct the crime in the same context in which it happened and recreate the behavior displayed by the criminal.