Applying Geographical Analysis to Serial Crime Investigations to Predict the Location of Future Targets and Determine Offender Residence

This paper presents two case studies to illustrate how geographical analysis of serial crime conducted within a geographic information system can assist crime investigation. Techniques are illustrated for determining the possible residence of offenders and for predicting the location of future crimes based on the geographical pattern of the existing crimes. It is found that such methods are relatively easy to implement within GIS given appropriate data but rely on many assumptions regarding offenders’ behaviour. While some success has been achieved in applying the techniques it is concluded that the methods are essentially theory-less and lack evaluation. Future research into the evaluation of such methods and in the geographic behaviour of serial offenders is required in order to apply such methods to investigations with confidence in their reliability.