Article

Predicting the home location of serial offenders: a preliminary comparison of the accuracy of human judges with a geographic profiling system†

  1. Brent Snook M.Sc.‡,*,
  2. David Canter Ph.D.§,
  3. Craig Bennell M.Sc.

Article first published online: 17 APR 2002

DOI: 10.1002/bsl.474

Issue

Behavioral Sciences & the Law

Behavioral Sciences & the Law

Special Issue: Current Directions

Volume 20, Issue 1-2, pages 109–118, January - April 2002

Additional Information

How to Cite

Snook, B., Canter, D. and Bennell, C. (2002), Predicting the home location of serial offenders: a preliminary comparison of the accuracy of human judges with a geographic profiling system. Behav. Sci. Law, 20: 109–118. doi: 10.1002/bsl.474

Author Information

  1. Department of Psychology, The University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Liverpool, L69 7ZA, U.K.

  1. ‡

    Brent Snook is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology, The University of Liverpool.

  2. §

    David Canter is the Director of Centre for Investigative Psychology and Professor of Psychology, The University of Liverpool.

  3. Craig Bennell is a research assistant and Ph.D. student at the Centre for Investigative Psychology

*Department of Psychology, The University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Liverpool, L69 7ZA, U.K.

  1. †

    This research was supported by Overseas Research Scholarships awarded to Snook and Bennell by the Overseas Research Students Award Scheme. The authors would like to thank Gareth Norris for assisting in the data collection and Andreas Mokros and Pavel Toropov for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Publication History

  1. Issue published online: 17 APR 2002
  2. Article first published online: 17 APR 2002

Funded by

  • Overseas Research Student Award Scheme

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Abstract

The accuracy with which human judges, before and after ‘training’, could predict the likely home location of serial offenders was compared with predictions produced by a geographic profiling system known as Dragnet. All predictions were derived from ten spatial displays, one for each of ten different U.S. serial murderers, indicating five crime locations. In all conditions participants were asked to place an ‘X’ on each spatial display corresponding to where they thought the offender lived. In the control condition, a comparison was made between the accuracy of these predictions for 21 participants on two separate occasions a few minutes apart. In the experimental condition, between their first and second predictions the 21 participants were given two heuristics to follow—distance-decay and circle hypothesis. Results showed that participants with no previous knowledge of geographic profiling were able to use the two heuristics to improve the accuracy of their predictions. The overall accuracy of the second set of predictions for the experimental group was also not significantly different from the accuracy of predictions generated by Dragnet. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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