GEOGRAPHIC PROFILING

The best achievement of my life is to have reached September without having killed my neighbors. If you knew how noisy they are, you would understand my feelings towards them. They are so mean and terrible that sometimes I have found myself planning the perfect murder.  A thought that makes me feel better for a while. The good thing is that they are not longer here in October so I got plenty of time till next year when they come here on vacations. Hopefully, I can find a way to sort this problem before then. But don´t worry because I will never take the life of another human being.

Anyway, I have been thinking so much about crime that I ended up studying geographical profiling this summer; the story of this discipline dates back to the late 1960´s. The grandfather was Stuart Kind, the man who helped to catch the Yorkshire ripper. At that time, the police did not know who the murderer was and, more importantly, they did not know where the offender was based. According to MR kind, if a victim was killed around 8:00 pm, the murderer was living far away but if the victim was killed in the very small hours of the night 12.00 and 1:00 Am, then the killer was not far away because the Ripper should be at home at a reasonable time. So he studied the sequence of the murders and he was very accurate about pointing out where the Yorkshire Ripper was located. He did a groundbreaking work, and without computer modeling, and managed to unravel the real identity of the offender; Peter Sutcliffe; a serial killer who killed thirteen women and attempting to murder seven others. Apparently, his outbreak of violence, if we are inclined to believe his own version of events, towards prostitutes seems to have occurred because he was swindled out of money by a hooker.  Sutcliffe carried out his revenge on women over five years- some of them were not even prostitutes- and he claimed that the voice of God had sent him on a mission to kill prostitutes.

Anyway geographic profiling is not an exact science but it is much more sciencetifical that it used to be in the past. We have to understand the relationship between people and geography. It´s an emerging field and we are starting to understand how people navigate. In fact, every single study that has been published collect more information to the general knowledge we posses now. Apparently most of the environmental criminologists suggest that crime sites and opportunities are not random. There is an emphasis in the interaction between the offender´s mental map of spatial surroundings and the allotment of victims.

Another principal in geographic profiling is that the offenders know about geographical profiling. So if the serial killer is based in the centre of a city, he will strike in different locations but he will never strike close to his base. There are other theories like the spatial behaviour where offenders are more likely to act on the first opportunity. It exhibits a constant tension between the offender desire to divert attention from his home base and the desire to travel no further. For other investigators, crime is less likely to occur the further away an offender is from their home base. It is concerned with the distance of crime and that offenders will in general travel limited distances to commit their crimes.

Crime, as you can imagine, is as revealing as the screams of my neighbours.

Sergio Calle Llorens