Geographic Profiling What Your Address

Geographic Profiling

What Your Address Say About You

Marketers can tell a lot about an individual simply by looking at her address, making often startlingly accurate assessments of what kind of car she drives, where she buys her groceries, what magazines she reads, and even how many children she is likely to have. This all seems perfectly innocuous, if bordering on the edge of invasion of privacy. However, there are also far darker aspects of a person's life that can be determined by a skilled profiler simply from knowing where a person lives. This paper examines the practice of geographic profiling.

Geographic profiling is a form of forensic investigation used to analyze a group of crimes that are connected in various specific ways to each other for which law enforcement officers do not have a clear suspect. However, even in the absence of such a subject, an analysis of the sites where the crimes have taken place can allow for a very specific and very accurate neighborhood in which the offender(s) lives. This technique tends to be used only for the most serious crimes such as serial murder or rape, although it is also used to help solve other crimes such as terrorist threats or acts. It is most useful for these types of crimes not because of their seriousness, a factor that increases the urgency with which law enforcement officers want to solve the crime but does not necessarily dictate the methodology used.

Rather, geographic profiling is especially helpful in solving cases such as serial murder because it is so well adapted to helping investigators sort through a very high volume of information, the kind of body of investigatory leads and tips from the public that are generated with high-profile crimes (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1984, p. 19).

The basis of the methodology is that investigators can determine highly significant and salient points about a criminal by where he or she chooses to commit crimes (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1984).The technique grew out of much more basic investigatory techniques in which crimes were mapped out on an actual paper map -- often with pushpins, a very low-tech approach to the process. However, while such an approach helped investigators in purely practical terms given that someone is likely to live fairly close by to where he or she commits crimes, it did not contain the element of psychological profiling that is the core strength of geographic profiling (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1984, p. 27).

Geographic profiling, which parallels the better-known process of criminal profiling that we've all seen performed in movies about FBI profilers, formally dates back to 1989 and work being done in the Simon Fraser University criminology department (MacKay, 1999, p. 53). The technique has roots in various psychological concepts that examine how individuals make choices about behavior and the ways in which motivations are formed and molded. It also draws on a set of investigatory techniques broadly called environmental criminology. Environmental criminology looks at how physical space influences people to commit crimes, how what particular types of crimes are committed are related to the physical space in which they occur (for example, farming communities tend to be the site of different types of crimes than is the case in housing projects or suburban cul de sacs) and how the type of person who is likely to be victimized is also related to physical space (MacKay, 1999).

Geographic profiling has moved a long way from the old tape-a-map-to-the-wall-and-stick-pushpins in it. Geographic profilers use highly specialized software systems that produce what are called "jeopardy surfaces" or "geoprofile," high detailed three-dimensional models of the most likely sites of residence for a criminal and helps law enforcement officials focus on a relatively narrow geographic area for their search (Canter, 2003, p. 48).