Abstract
In the region of Charleroi (Belgium), a series of criminal acts were committed by the same group, using the same vehicle. The events were located in space and time. The car used during these criminal activities was stolen (first event) and was later retrieved (last event) after a period of 4 days of offences. Police recorded a crucial clue: the total mileage covered by the vehicle between the first and the last event was estimated with an admissible approximation. Thanks to this information, we were able to choose the most probable journey-to-crime among several scenarios. These depended on the combination of cost surfaces built with distance propagation algorithms starting from each criminal event in raster mode. The distance propagations were limited to the road network and the combinations of the cost surfaces had to respect the chronology of the facts. The most plausible scenario suggested that the criminals hided the car into a withdrawal site between their activities. In order to improve the precision of the location of this withdrawal site, we used a multi-criteria analysis taking account of the journey of the vehicle and other environment variables. At the end of these treatments, the small stretch of road that we isolated actually included the withdrawal site, as confirmed by the police later.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Alston J (1994) The serial rapist’s spatial pattern of target selection. Master thesis, Simon Fraser University
Alston J (2001) The serial rapist’s spatial pattern of victim selection. In: Godwin MG (ed) Criminal psychology and forensic technology: a collaborative approach to effective profiling. CRC Press, Boca Raton
Bernasco W, Block R (2009) Where offenders choose to attack: a discrete choice model of robberies in Chicago. Criminol Interdiscip J 47(1):93–130
Brantingham PL, Brantingham PJ (1981) Notes on the geometry of crime. In: Brantingham PL, Brantingham PJ (eds) Environmental criminology. Sage, Beverly Hills
Canter D (2003) Mapping murder: secrets of geographic profiling. Virgin, London
Canter D, Hammond L (2006) A comparison of the efficacy of different decay functions in geographical profiling for a sample of US serial killers. J Investig Psychol Offender Profil 3:91–103
Canter D, Coffey T, Huntley M, Missen C (2000) Predicting serial killers’ home base using a decision support system. J Quant Criminol 16:457–478
CCE (1993) CORINE land cover. Guide technique, Office des publications officielles des Communautés Européennes, 144 p
Chainey S, Ratcliffe J (2005) GIS and crime mapping. Wiley, West Sussex
Daniell C (2008) Geographic profiling in an operational setting: the challenges and practical considerations, with reference to a series of sexual assaults in Bath, England. In: Spencer Chainey LT (ed) Crime mapping case studies. Wiley, West Sussex
Eastman JR, Jin W, Kyem PAK, Toledano J (1995) Raster procedures for multi-criteria/multi-objective decisions. Photogramm Eng Remote Sens 61(5):539–547
Eck J, Chainey S, Cameron J, Leitner M, Wilson RE (2005) Mapping crime: understanding hot spots. In: Justice UDO (ed). National Institute of Justice, Washington, DC
Groff ER, La Vigne NG (2001) Mapping an opportunity surface of residential burglary. J Res Crime Delinq 38:257–278
Kent J, Leitner M (2009) Utilizing land cover characteristics to enhance journey-to-crime estimation models. Cime mapping. J Res Pract 1:33–54
Kent J, Leitner M, Curtis A (2006) Evaluating the usefulness of functional distance measures when calibrating journey-to-crime distance decay functions. Comput Environ Urban Syst 30:181–200
Leitner M, Kent J (2009) Bayesian journey-to-crime modelling of single and multiple crime-type series in Baltimore County MD. J Investig Psychol Offender Profil 6(3):213–236
Levine N (2007) CrimeStat: a spatial statistics program for the analysis of crime incident locations 3.2a ed. Ned Levine & Associates/National Institute of Justice, Houston/Washington, DC
Levine N, Block R (2011) Bayesian journey-to-crime estimation: an improvement in geographic profiling methodology. Prof Geogr 63:213–229
Levine N, Lee P (2009) Bayesian journey-to-crime modelling of juvenile and adult offenders by gender in Manchester. J Investig Psychol Offender Profil 6(3):237–251
Lundrigan S, Czarnomski S (2006) Spatial characteristics of serial sexual assault in New Zealand. Aust N Z J Criminol 39:218–231
Lundrigan S, Czarnomski S, Wilson M (2010) Spatial and environmental consistency in serial sexual assault. J Investig Psychol Offender Profil 7:15–30
Mohler G, Short M (2012) Geographic profiling from kinetic models of criminal behavior. SIAM J Appl Math 72:163–180
Qian C, Wang, Y, Cao J, Lu J, Kurths J (2011) Weighted-traffic-network–based geographic profiling for serial crime location prediction. EPL 93:6
Rossmo K (2000) Geographic profiling. CRC Press, Boca Raton
Saati TL (1980) The analytical hierarchy process for decision in a complex world. RWS Publications, Pittsburg
Smith W, Bond JW, Townsley M (2009) Determining how journeys-to-crime vary: measuring inter- and intra-offender crime trip distributions. In: Weisburd D, Bernasco W, Bruinsma GJN (eds) Putting crime in its place. Springer, New York
Snook B, Cullen RM, Mokros A, Harbort S (2005) Serial murderers’ spatial decisions: factors that influence crime location choice. J Investig Psychol Offender Profil 2:147–164
Tonkin M, Woodhams J, Bond JW, Loe T (2010) A theoretical and practical test of geographical profiling with serial vehicle theft in a U.K. context. Behav Sci Law 28:442–460
Trotta M, Bidaine B, Donnay JP (2011) Determining the geographical origin of a serial offender considering the temporal uncertainty of the recorded crime data. In: Iaria (ed) GEOProcessing 2011: the third international conference on Advanced Geographic Information Systems, Applications, and Services, Gosier, pp 40–45
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kasprzyk, JP., Trotta, M., Broxham, K., Donnay, JP. (2013). Reconstitution of the Journeys to Crime and Location of Their Origin in the Context of a Crime Series. A Raster Solution for a Real Case Study. In: Leitner, M. (eds) Crime Modeling and Mapping Using Geospatial Technologies. Geotechnologies and the Environment, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4997-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4997-9_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-4996-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-4997-9
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)