Catching criminals

Most criminals aren't going to commit a crime on their own doorstep- there's a buffer zone- but they're also not going to travel long distances to places they don't know well, Le Comber explains. [...]when you create a 3-D graph of where a suspected or known criminal is likely to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Scientist Vol. 27; no. 4; p. 21
Main Author Mole, Beth Marie
Format Journal Article Trade Publication Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Midland Scientist Inc 01.04.2013
LabX Media Group
Subjects
Biologists
Cholera
Colleges & universities
Criminal profiling
Criminals
Graduate students
Murders & murder attempts
Practice
Serial crime
Tropical diseases
United Kingdom
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Summary:Most criminals aren't going to commit a crime on their own doorstep- there's a buffer zone- but they're also not going to travel long distances to places they don't know well, Le Comber explains. [...]when you create a 3-D graph of where a suspected or known criminal is likely to commit a crime, it forms a volcano shape around the criminal's home base. If an area is saturated with a disease- such as is the case for Malawi, Africa, where malaria is endemic- the model won't be able to pinpoint origins, Le Comber says. [...]the model may be most useful "in situations where things are very well reported, which is not often the case with tropical infectious diseases," adds spatial epidemiologist Jane Messina of the University of Oxford, who works on modeling the spread of dengue virus, another mosquito-bome illness.
ISSN:0890-3670
1547-0806