Criminal Profiling Essay

1637 Words7 Pages

Criminal profiling is a technique that aids in the investigation of serial crimes by providing insight to the offenders next move (Rich & Shively, 2004). The main two methods of criminal profiling are geographical and psychological (Rich & Shively, 2004). New software is being developed to aid in the apprehending of serial offenders (Rich & Shively, 2004). The use of criminal profiling software has been shown to be effective in solving crimes. There have been many cases that have been solved due to profiling and predicting the offenders’ next move.
Description
CrimeStat, Dragnent, and Rigel are all based on the same mathematical background (O’Leary, 2009). The two factors that go into the formula are: (1) the distance between the target and the offenders anchor point, (2) local landmarks in an offenders area. An anchor point is based …show more content…

They took all the crime scenes and put them on a map of Milan and the software used was CrimeStat (Santtila, 2003). It generalizes data to find a geographical location (Santtila, 2003).
The first case that was examined happened in 1973 in Milan (Santtila, 2003). This offender was highly dangerous to the area since he has eight victims. The second case that was examined was in Milan in 1981 and this offender had 11 assaults (Santtila, 2003). The third offender in 1990 was mentally ill and had five assaults on his record. The fourth case was from 1996 in Monza with nine assaults (Santtila, 2003).
The researchers used solved cases but the home locations to them were unknown. Santtila (2003) used four different offenders who had multiple numbers of assaults on record. The results were beneficial to finding the homes of these four serial rapists (Santtila, 2003). The more crime scenes there were, the more precise the location came out (Santtila, 2003).
Criminal Profiling Belief and