ABSTRACT
The possibility of linking those crimes committed by a common offender, along with Geographical Offender Profiling, is one of the most immediately revolutionary operational advances Investigative Psychology offers to criminal investigations. But it is also one of the most theoretically and conceptually challenging areas of the discipline, drawing as it does on core psychological issues of behavioural consistency and development. In this Chapter, Craig describes the background to the important paper outlining the highly innovative use of ROC analysis in crime linking, that he and David Canter published in 2002 (Bennell and Canter, 2002) and some of his work since. As Craig outlines, a crime linking function is an important component of the police decision support systems Professor Canter and his team have pioneered (see, e.g., Canter and Youngs’ 2008 description of the original interactive Offender Profiling System -iOPS).
