Prioritising suspects using their activity locations
Sophie Curtis‐Ham, Wim Bernasco · CrimRxiv · 2025
Geographical offender profiling involves interpreting a range of geographic clues in support of identifying offenders in criminal investigations. This chapter describes a new geographical offender profiling approach that focuses on the clues revealed by known suspects’ previously recorded activity locations—such as their home addresses, workplaces or past crime locations—and how these clues can be used to prioritise suspects for further investigation. Our aim is to highlight the potential of this approach—as evident from its accuracy when implemented algorithmically and tested on solved cases—and provide some pointers for its application in practice. First, we summarise the theoretical foundations of the approach and describe a recently proposed theoretical model that explains near which activity locations people are likely to commit crime. Second, we detail how this model can be used in a structured way to inform inferences about which suspects are most likely to have committed a single crime or a series of crimes, given what the police know about their activity locations. We provide both quantitative (statistical or algorithmic) and qualitative methods for prioritising suspects, depending on the tools available and the size of the suspect list.