ABSTRACT
In the mid-1980s scientists assisting police investigations [Kind 1999, Canter 1994, Canter 2004, Rossmo 1995]1 realised that they could estimate where an offender was likely to be based from an analysis of the geographical locations of that offender’s crimes. This process of indicating the possible area in which police should search for an offender eventually became known as ‘geographical profiling’ [Canter 2004], or in North America – where they worry less about syntactical niceties – ‘geographic profiling’ [Rossmo 1995].
