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A new Geographic Profiling Suspect Mapping And Ranking Technique for crime investigations: GP-SMART

Abstract
This study developed and tested a new geographic profiling method for automating suspect prioritisation in crime investigations. The Geographic Profiling Suspect Mapping And Ranking Technique (GP-SMART) maps suspects' activity locations available in police records—such as home addresses, family members' home addresses, prior offence locations, locations of non-crime incidents, and other contacts with police—and ranks suspects based on both the proximity and nature of these locations, relative to an input crime. In accuracy tests using solved burglary, robbery and extra-familial sex offence cases in New Zealand (n = 4511), GP-SMART ranked the offender at or near the top of the suspect list at rates greatly exceeding chance. Highlighting the benefit of its novel inclusion and differentiation of many different types of activity location, GP-SMART also outperformed baseline methods—approximating existing algorithms—that ranked suspects using only the proximity of their activity locations, or home addresses, to the input crime.
Type
Journal Article
Type of thesis
Series
Citation
Date
2022
Publisher
Wiley
Degree
Supervisors
Rights
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2022 The Authors. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.