Catching criminals

• Published in: The Scientist Vol. 27; no. 4; p. 21
• Main Author: Mole, Beth Marie
• Format: Journal Article Trade Publication Article
• Language: English
• 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
• ISSN: 0890-3670

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.