ASSESSMENT, EVALUATION AND MAPPING OF INDIVIDUALLY CALIBRATED
JOURNEY-TO-CRIME CRIMINAL GEOGRAPHIC PROFILING MODELS
M. Leitner, T. Pal
mleitne@lsu.edu
The overall objective of this research is to evaluate the usefulness of individually calibrated journey-to-crime (JTC) criminal geographic profiling (CGP) models.
The
data set used in this research consists of a total of 247 serial crimes with
both incident and home locations of the arrested offender known. It comprises of nine different crime types,
including larceny (51), arson (4), auto theft (31), robbery [commercial (76),
street (17), and mixed (15)], rape (1), and burglary [residential (51) and
commercial (1)]. All offenders were
arrested for three or more of the same crime type in
The JTC CGP method estimates the serial offender’s “haven” based on a mathematically calibrated distance decay function defined for the observed travel patterns of the calibration group. Ideally, the calibration group includes many crimes from the same crime type and has been collected for the same study area as the test group. The test group includes all crime scenes associated with the same serial offense, for which a geographic profile is estimated. The five different distance decay functions that will be evaluated in this research include the linear, negative exponential, truncated negative exponential, normal and lognormal.
Preliminary results show that individually calibrated distance decay functions significantly increase the accuracy of JTC criminal geographic profiles compared to when a JTC CGP is calculated with the CrimeStat III default parameters. However, preliminary results comparing the accuracy of CGP models derived from the same individually calibrated distance decay functions with other CGP models and spatial distribution measures have been inconclusive.