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Predicting the home location of serial offenders: a preliminary comparison of the accuracy of human judges with a geographic profiling system
Author(s) -
Snook Brent,
Canter David,
Bennell Craig
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
behavioral sciences and the law
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.649
H-Index - 74
eISSN - 1099-0798
pISSN - 0735-3936
DOI - 10.1002/bsl.474
Subject(s) - heuristics , profiling (computer programming) , offender profiling , computer science , poison control , psychology , data mining , statistics , mathematics , medicine , medical emergency , visualization , operating system
The accuracy with which human judges, before and after ‘training’, could predict the likely home location of serial offenders was compared with predictions produced by a geographic profiling system known as Dragnet. All predictions were derived from ten spatial displays, one for each of ten different U.S. serial murderers, indicating five crime locations. In all conditions participants were asked to place an ‘X’ on each spatial display corresponding to where they thought the offender lived. In the control condition, a comparison was made between the accuracy of these predictions for 21 participants on two separate occasions a few minutes apart. In the experimental condition, between their first and second predictions the 21 participants were given two heuristics to follow—distance‐decay and circle hypothesis. Results showed that participants with no previous knowledge of geographic profiling were able to use the two heuristics to improve the accuracy of their predictions. The overall accuracy of the second set of predictions for the experimental group was also not significantly different from the accuracy of predictions generated by Dragnet. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.