Table of Contents for

Your Code as a Crime Scene

Get a Crash Course in Offender Profiling

You probably know a little bit about offender profiling already. Movies such as the 1990s hit The Silence of the Lambs popularized the profession, and that popularity exists even decades after the movie’s theatrical release.

In The Silence of the Lambs, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, is an imprisoned convicted killer. Throughout the movie, he is presented with details from different crime scenes. He takes the information and deduces the offender’s personality and motivations for committing the crime. The police use his profile to identify and find the serial killer Buffalo Bill. (Sorry for the spoiler!) While impressive, Dr. Lecter’s stunning forensics skills have a serious limitation: they only work in Hollywood movies.

Fortunately, we have scientifically valid profiling alternatives that extend to the real world. Read along, and I’ll show you how the tools forensic psychologists use to attack these open-ended problems can also be useful for software developers.

Learn Geographical Profiling of Crimes

Geographical profiling has its scientific basis in statistics and environmental psychology. It’s a complex subject with a fair share of controversies (just like programming!), but the basic principles are simple enough.

Criminals aren’t that different from us: they go to work, visit restaurants and shops, and keep in touch with friends. They build mental maps of all the places they go. This is not specific to criminals—we all build mental maps. But an offender uses the mental map to decide where to commit a crime.

The locations where crimes occur are very rarely random—the geographical locations contain valuable information about the offender. Think about it for a moment: there must be an overlap in space and time between the offender and a victim, right?

Once a crime has been committed, the offender realizes it would be too dangerous to return to that area. Typically, the location of the next crime is in the opposite direction from the first scene.

Over time, these crime scenes form a circle on a map. So while an offender’s deeds may be bizarre, the rationale behind the processes is logical. (See Principles of Geographical Offender Profiling [CY08a] for an in-depth discussion.) We can look at the patterns and profile the person who committed the crimes. Let’s take a look at how geographic profiling can help track down one of the most notorious serial killers in history, Jack the Ripper.