ICADL 2007 - LNCS 4822

Mining Police Digital Archives to Link Criminal Styles with Offender Characteristics

Richard Bache¹, Fabio Crestani¹, David Canter², and Donna Youngs²

¹Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Strathclyde, Scotland
r.bache@cis.strath.ac.uk
f.crestani@cis.strath.ac.uk

²Centre for Investigative Psychology, England
dcanter@ukonline.co.uk

Abstract. The partial success in inferring the characteristics of offenders from their criminal behaviour (‘offender profiling’) has relied on limited data and subjective judgments. We therefore sought to determine if Information Retrieval techniques and in particular Language Modelling could be applied directly to existing police digital records of criminal events to identify significant characteristics of offenders. The categories selected were gender and age group. Results showed that distinct differences in characteristics do exist.

Keywords: Document Classification, Text Data Mining, Language Models, Crime Data, Investigative Psychology, Offender Profiling

LNCS 4822, p. 493 f.

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