Offender Characteristics in Crime Analysis
The bureau introduced criminal profiling. Profiling refers to the process of applying one’s techniques and learning tactics to discover potential suspects and using useful tips and information gathered from investigations. There are various types of offender characteristics, which include spatial, temporal, and socio-demographic characteristics. Spatial consists of visual factors that relate crime locations to their potential connection to other events and strategies that determine crime hot spots. Socio-demographic is composed of individual characteristics overall and then group qualities in a broader term. Finally, temporal characteristics portray crime trends that broken down over the years, term patterns, and seasons. This paper will analyze offenders’ features and how they are applied in crime analysis focusing on spatial, temporal, and socio-demographic characteristics.
When the police department or agencies that investigate criminal trends, whether individuals or groups, combine the above-discussed categories, they can quickly identify crime groups, individuals, or even movements of criminal events. These characteristics allow for more accurate intelligence led-policing, whether individual, hotspots or seasonal trends (Fitterer et al., 2015). Intelligence-led policing refers to the discipline of allowing data and analysis to lead decision making and allocation in a police department, instead of individual threats.
Crime analysis refers to the process applied to increase the applicability of all available resources to address crime and ways to minimize, prevent, and evaluate crime activities. During crime analysis, socio-demographic characteristics help keep tabs on repeat offenders’ profiles such as race, age, sex, and others (Turvey, 2020). Moreover, police departments and agents utilize spatial characteristics by using the collected intelligence, for instance, hotspot mapping. Hotspot mapping helps determine where to allocate assets based on how criminal activities occur in particular places. Finally, the temporal characteristic is closely associated with spatial characteristics to predict trends and locations related to certain crimes.
When employing this data and placing it all together, the learning to crime analysis becomes a powerful study in forecasting offenders, crime trends, and the trends in where certain criminal activities happen. Besides, offender characteristics assist crime analysts forecast, prevent, and comprehend the correlation between offenders and their offenses and locations (Santos & Taylor, 2014). Also, there are other features to help in crime analysis, such as geographic data systems. This device helps in crime mapping, for instance, spatial analysis of issues related to police. The primary mission in crime analysis is to support police departments’ hard work through collecting intelligence, examining it, and then transmitting the information and data to the department to aid in intelligence led-policing. As a result, crime analysis makes police department abilities proactive rather than reactive when handling crime activities in their local communities and cities (Turvey, 2020). Evidently, lack of crime analysis and the use of multiple offender characteristics would drag the police department behind the fight of law and order, rather than being a proactive force as the departments are today.
In conclusion, various offender characteristics are applied to crime analysis. Such features include spatial, temporal, and socio-demographic characteristics. Socio-demographic characteristics help in keeping track of repeat offender profiles like sex, age, and race. Spatial characteristics allow the police to utilize collected intelligence, such as hotspot mapping. Lastly, temporal characteristics are associated with spatial to help predict trends and locations of criminal activities. Therefore, offender characteristics play a significant role in crime analysis.
References
Fitterer, J., Nelson, T. A., & Nathoo, F. (2015). Predictive crime mapping. Police Practice and
Research, 16(2), 121-135.
Santos, R. B., & Taylor, B. (2014). The integration of crime analysis into police patrol
work. Policing: an international journal of police strategies & management.
Turvey, B. E. (Ed.). (, 2020). Criminal profiling: an introduction to behavioral evidence analysis.
Academic Press.