ABSTRACT
Geographic profi ling was pioneered by Professor D. Kim Rossmo, currently at Texas State University, San Marcos, and is a technique used by police to prioritize suspect lists in a criminal investigation. Geographic profi ling uses the locations of a connected series of criminal events to determine the offender’s “anchor point”— most often offender’s residence, but it may also be a workplace, school, hangout, or friend’s residence. Because this technique uses a connected series of criminal events, the most common uses of geographic profi ling are in the investigation of serial murder, rape, arson, burglary, or robbery. Though the discussion below will focus on serial offending for simplicity, it should be noted that geographic profi ling can also be used for non-serial criminal events that involve multiple locations. For example, the series of criminal events may be connected as the locations of where an offender stole a vehicle, robbed a convenience store, robbed a liquor store, and then abandoned the vehicle. Geographic profi ling has proven, and continues, to be a useful method for understanding the nature of serial offenders from an academic perspective, partially because it allows for the classifi cation of different offender types. But geographic profi ling has also proven to be an instructive tool for the practice of investigative policing.
