Hunting the hunters - Evaluating a new method of Geographic Profiling

Sammanfattning: Geographic Profiling (GP) may be used when searching for an unknown offender by applying mathematical algorithms to geographical information. This thesis aimed to contribute to improvement of the efficiacy of GP’s produced by law enforcement by evaluating a the new Spaulding/Morris Centrographic (SMC)-method of GP that claims to counteract two of the main difficulties when constructing a GP in a real world investigation: 1. Being sure that the geographical information really is correctly linked to the same serial offender, and 2. The vastly different effects on travel time and distance diverse urban environments has depending on mode of transport. The study was unable to replicate previous encouraging results with similar levels of preciseness and accuracy as previous studies. Rather, an experimental analysis of the SMC-method showed that the steps suggested by the authors had a degrading effect on accuracy and preciseness. However as the study is small-n this result is tentative. The study thus failed to identify a GP-method with higher efficiacy than conventional methods, instead putting the usability of the suggested method into question as well as suggesting new avenues of research.