Serial Crime Research Articles

Оперативно-розыскная характеристика личности преступника, совершающего половые преступления в отношении малолетних и несовершеннолетних

this article deals with the issues of operational-search characteristics of the criminal personality, committing sexual crimes, types of crimes against sexual integrity and sexual freedom, the qualification of the person committing sexual crimes, its psychological characteristics, as well as issues related to the study of the criminal personality, as one of the elements of operational-search characteristics of the investigation and disclosure of crimes against sexual integrity of minors and minors. Investigative and operational investigative practice includes the development of a psychological portrait of a person unknown to law enforcement agencies, but the perpetrator of the crime Studied several types of crimes against sexual integrity and sexual freedom of minors and minors, which include sexual depravity. The article States that the subject of rape can be a male person, but women can also become criminals in this area, not only acting as an organizer, instigator or accomplice, but also as a person who commits a sexual crime. The article provides recommendations for the development of a file, which should contain the most complete information about the perpetrators of sexual crimes, the external characteristics of persons in respect of whom sexual interest was expressed. The presence of such information will make the most effective work of law enforcement agencies in the operational investigation and disclosure of these crimes, will increase the efficiency in identifying persons who have committed sexual crimes, and most importantly prevent possible serial crimes.

MATCH: A New Approach for Differentiating & Linking Series of Sex Worker Homicides and Sexual Assaults.

Sex workers as a group are one of the more common targets in serial homicide, yet the most likely to go unsolved. Part of the reason for this is the difficulty in linking individual crime scenes to a series, especially in those series where offenders not only target sex worker victims but also target non-sex worker victims. Inconsistencies in both victim targeting and behaviors engaged in across series add to the difficulties of linking and solvability in these types of crimes. The current study aimed to add to the current body of literature on serial crime linkage by examining not only the most salient behavioral indicators useful for crime scene classification of serial homicides that involve sex worker victims but also examine the trajectories of behavioral change that can help link apparently inconsistent crime scenes and proposes the new Model for the Analysis of Trajectories and Consistency in Homicide (MATCH). The study examines 83 homicide series, including 44 (53%) series where all victims were sex workers and 39 (47%) series that included a mix of sex workers and non-sex worker victims. Using the MATCH system allowed for the majority of series to be classified to a dominant trajectory pattern, over half as many as a traditional consistency analysis that focusses on behavioral similarity matching. Results further showed that Sex Worker Victim series were almost three times more consistent across their series than Mixed-Victim series, not only in victim selection but also in the overall behavioral patterns. Findings are discussed in line with theoretical and psychological issues relating to understanding the nature of behavioral consistency and the importance of going beyond simple matching toward a model that allows for the identification of consistency in seemingly inconsistent series, as well as investigative implications relating to linking serial crimes.

Sex Worker Homicide Series: Profiling the Crime Scene.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, offenders who kill sex workers as part of their series exhibit substantial variability in their victim selection and behavioral patterns, thus creating additional issues for the investigation of these crimes. This article first aims to outline differences in the demographics of crime scene actions present in homicide series with exclusively sex worker victims and series that includes both sex worker and non-sex worker victims, with the aim of understanding the crime scene aetiology of these two different types of series. Second, the research aims to determine between-series differences of victimology as well as crime scene action between sex worker series and mixed-victim series. Third, the research focuses on mixed-victim series and aims to determine the within-series similarities of victimology and crime scene actions, that is, what factors link sex worker victims and non-sex worker victims in the same series. Data were collected through a large-scale review of international media sources to identify solved serial homicide cases that have included at least one sex worker. Of the 83 series looked at, 44 (53%) included sex worker victims only, and 39 (47%) of the series included both sex worker and non-sex worker victims. The findings highlight the challenges that these types of crime present for investigation and the implications they have on current crime analysis research and practice, and results are discussed in line with theoretical and psychological issues relating to understanding differentiation and similarity, as well as investigative implications relating to linkage blindness and linking of serial crimes.

Complicating the serial killer novel: the bystander narrator as genre disrupter

ABSTRACTThe serial killer novel has enjoyed unabated popularity since Thomas Harris’s 1988 bestseller The Silence of the Lambs prompted a publishing boom in the genre that endures today. Harris, as well as the influx of novelists who have followed in his wake, have been criticised for their gratuitous sensationalism, and for the rigid conservatism of their narrative arcs, which feature a return to order after the anarchism and disorder of the serial killer – narratives which bear little resemblance to the reality of the abject violence of serial homicide and its traumatic aftermath. This article examines the case studies of Ali Land’s novel Good Me Bad Me, and Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident, and identifies the way in which both writers innovate within the genre by using the bystander narrator to subvert the tropes of the detective procedural and decentre the generic focus on the monstrous figure of the serial killer, focussing the novel instead on the aftermath of the crime and its victims. The article argues such interventions by contemporary novelists in the serial killer genre offer a profound innovation that complicates the familiar narrative arc of anarchic crime and resolution in favour of a more ambiguous and realistic view of serial crime.

“The Truth May Will Turn Out To Be More Stranger Than we Think”: The “Whydunit” in Agatha Christie’s A Pocket Full of Rye

Crime fiction is a very popular genre that is worthy of exploration and analysis. It dates as far back as the earliest crime fiction of Thomas Skinner Sturr’s anonymous Richmond in 1827, up to the present. In fact, twenty-first century statistics show that the most sold novels are detective fiction. Accordingly, the present study proposes to examine a novel by the queen of crime fiction, Agatha Christie (1890-1976). Her influence on the golden age of the crime mystery is highly considered due to her innovative creativity and improvement of the classic whodunit stories. Christie has developed the whodunit genre through her stunning plots in which she had made it possible for anyone to commit a crime; a sweet son or daughter, a dear husband, and even a gentle-looking grandmother. Christie breached the conventional rules of the genre by introducing puzzle-like plots. Her intricate plots deserve serious recognition. One of her most famous whodunit novels is A Pocket Full of Rye (1953). This mystery fiction is saliently known for its nursery rhyme crime in which a murderer follows in his crime a popular and traditional song. Henceforth, the psychological consciousness of the culprit and the hidden motives behind his serial crimes need to be deeply analyzed. On that account, this non-thesis proposes to look at the “Whydunit” rather than the by now exhausted Whodunit. Consequently, using the psychological approach to literature, this study investigates the why of the murders committed rather than the who. The intention of this study is to mark a revival of interest in this now-forgotten writer.

Анализ социальных и психологических теорий причинности серийной преступности

Анализ социальных и психологических теорий причинности серийной преступности

A Fuzzy Multicriteria Decision-Making Approach to Crime Linkage

This article describes how serial crimes are very interesting for study in the absence of proper and solid evidence. From a high volume of criminal cases of similar types, it is difficult to detect the crimes that were committed by the same offender or not. The process of linking of crimes which were committed by the same offender or offenders is called Crime Linkage Analysis. In this article, a new hesitant fuzzy distance measure has been introduced and a fuzzy multicriteria decision-making approach has been proposed to help Crime Linkage Analysis, which enables us to find to what extent a pair of crime shares a common offender or offenders.

Критерии анализа теорий причинности серийной преступности (на примере биологических теорий)

Критерии анализа теорий причинности серийной преступности (на примере биологических теорий)

AMENITIES SURROUNDING COMMERCIAL SERIAL CRIME PREDICTION AT GREATER VALLEY AND KUALA LUMPUR USING K-MEANS CLUSTERING/PENGECAMAN KEMUDAHAN AWAM SEKITAR LOKASI JENAYAH KORMESIAL BERSIRI DI LEMBAH KLANG DAN KUALA LUMPUR MENGGUNAKAN KAEDAH GUGUSAN K-MEANS

Serial crime recognition is a critical task. Usually, police officer investigates the serial crime behavior based on their heuristics, evidence or prior information from public. Sometimes, the police officer makes inadequate decision when handling the serial crime problems due to lack of preliminary study on relationship between serial crime and amenities. Therefore, this study explores k-means to identify pattern of surroundings area at serial comersial crime scene. In Malaysia, precisely Selangor, Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur and Wilayah Persekutuan Putrjaya, a set data of serial crime including index and non-index, and its surroundings area at crime scene are being investigated. Experimental result shows that ‘hot spot’ amenities such as bank, commercial center, restorant, place of worship, resident and school are highly involved with three types of crime namely house breaking at night, day and robbery without firearm. Furthermore, radius distance with 0.2 km and 0.3 km between the crime scene location and its amenities at surroundings area captured from Safe City Monitoring System are also being evaluated and analyzed. Consequently, our finding helps the police to easily observe and prevent criminal behavior by assigning necessary human resource based on their ‘hot spot’ amenities.

Gateway Bodies: Serial Form, Genre, and White Femininity in Imported Crime TV

In this article, I study transnational crime TV through a key recurring textual element—serial narrative—to understand how it creates terms of transnational legibility in a major import market, the United States. These programs’ serial form both suits the ecology of the U.S. post-network era and articulates aesthetic and ideological norms recognizable to U.S. audiences. Imported serial crime TV is tied to multiple genres and familiar tropes of gender and race, often relying on the discovery of white female victims to galvanize police investigations, serve as gothic spectacles, and animate family melodramas. DR’s Forbrydelsen exemplifies such complexly layered and “translatable” serial form. I argue that the aesthetics of this and other programs foreground raced female bodies to deterritorialize them, in the process creating a transnational lingua franca in crime TV. In repeatedly pairing such victims and female detectives, these shows ultimately also illuminate the place feminism itself occupies in transnational flow.

Geographical offender profiling: Dragnet's applicability on a Brazilian sample

AbstractEven though geographical offender profiling is already widely used and researched in countries such as England, Canada, and United States, it is still severely overlooked in Brazil, as there are no researches on the subject using a Brazilian sample. Therefore, the present paper aims to start filling this gap by analysing the applicability of the geographical offender profiling and Dragnet on a sample of Brazilian serial killers. In order to achieve this objective, the authors collected data through police records on 15 serial killers that were active between June 2009 and June 2015, in the city of Campina Grande, Paraíba, Brazil. As a result, the circle hypothesis was confirmed, considering that 66.7% of the sample fell into the marauder category. Interestingly, the Dragnet's result accurately informed the area that contained the offender's base in the same cases in which the offender acted according to the marauder model. Also, other important correlations were found such as the influence of age, intelligence, resourcefulness, and method of approach on the distance travelled to commit a murder. Those results show that the geographical offender profiling can be effectively applied in Brazil and thus is a valid investigative tool to aid police officers in serial crimes investigations.

Transposition of Modus Operandi from the Real to the Virtual Using Several Signatures: Case of "The Drowned of the Garonne"Serial Crimes in France

Transposition of Modus Operandi from the Real to the Virtual Using Several Signatures: Case of "The Drowned of the Garonne"Serial Crimes in France

Transposition of modus operandi from the real to the virtual using several signatures: Case of "the drowned of the Garonne" serial crimes in France

Transposition of modus operandi from the real to the virtual using several signatures: Case of "the drowned of the Garonne" serial crimes in France

Serial crime as occupation: Parallels between occupational analysis and psychological profiling

ABSTRACTThis preliminary discussion suggests a process for studying serial crime as an occupation. To date, no investigation of the occupational components of crime has been undertaken by disciplines that historically contribute to forensic science, nor by occupational scientists, although studies have addressed occupational deprivation issues in prisons and how incarcerated individuals establish or restore healthy patterns of occupations as they reintegrate into society. The discussion centers on the processes involved in the occupational profiling of persons who engage in such occupations. Relevant occupational science constructs include the form, function and meaning of criminal occupations, as well as the skills, capabilities, motivations, and contexts of the offender. An occupational perspective might assist with identification of the nature, structure and characteristics of the occupations that comprise offenders’ lives, as well as the subjective experience, process, and outcomes of the occupational performance of serial crimes in innovative ways. Such analysis would complement psychological profiling, which includes collecting crime scene information, arranging this information into meaningful patterns, analyzing victim and offender risk, and reconstructing the crime and the offender motivation, to create a specific description of the law violator.

The neural signature of emotional memories in serial crimes

Neural plasticity is the process whereby semantic information and emotional responses are stored in neural networks. It is hypothesized that the neural networks built over time to encode the sexual fantasies that motivate serial killers to act should display a unique, detectable activation pattern. The pathological neural watermark hypothesis posits that such networks comprise activation of brain sites that reflect four cognitive components: autobiographical memory, sexual arousal, aggression, and control over aggression. The neural sites performing these cognitive functions have been successfully identified by previous research. The key findings are reviewed to hypothesise the typical pattern of activity that serial killers should display. Through the integration of biological findings into one framework, the neural approach proposed in this paper is in stark contrast with the many theories accounting for serial killers that offer non-medical taxonomies. The pathological neural watermark hypothesis offers a new framework to understand and detect deviant individuals. The technical and legal issues are briefly discussed.

Comparative case research and applied psychology in serial crimes

The author provides an overview of how crime-scene offender profiling developed in the past two decades in serial crimes.

A decision support system for detecting serial crimes

Serial crimes pose a great threat to public security. Linking crimes committed by the same offender can assist the detecting of serial crimes and is of great importance in maintaining public security. Currently, most crime analysts still link serial crimes empirically especially in China and desire quantitative tools to help them. This paper presents a decision support system for crime linkage based on various, including behavioral, features of criminal cases. Its underlying technique is pairwise classification based on similarity, which is interpretable and easy to tune. We design feature similarity algorithms to calculate the pairwise similarities and build up a classifier to determine whether a case pair should belong to a series. A comprehensive case study of a real-world robbery dataset demonstrates its promising performance even with the default setting. This system has been deployed in a public security bureau of China and running for more than one year with positive feedback from users. The use of this system would provide individual officers with strong support in crimes investigation then allow law enforcement agency to save resources, since the system not only can link serial crimes automatically based on a classification model learned from historical crime data, but also has flexibility in training data update and domain experts interaction, including adjusting the key components like similarity matrices and decision thresholds to reach a good tradeoff between caseload and number of true linked pairs.

GIS based Serial Crime Analysis using Data Mining Techniques

crimes are the problems which are mostly committed by minority of offenders. The law enforcement people are forced to find out the serial crime which is considered as complex task. In order to find out the serial crimes, one needs to investigate the large number of crimes which are unlinked with each other. These problem need to be analyzed in different ways to find out the link that exist among each crimes which happened in various locations. In the previous work, cut clustering algorithm were used to cluster the similar type of crime happened in various locations. However the existing work lacks from the number of labeled classes used for clustering which will limit the number of data points to be used. Also the cut clustering algorithm used in the existing research leads to be more complex that does not specify the characteristics of the sub graphs that are created hence it leads to the complexity of deciding a node to be added or deleted. To overcome these problems, in our work majority weighted minority over sampling technique is used to handle class imbalance problem and the dynamic cut clustering is introduced which overcomes the limitation of graph cut clustering algorithm. In this work Quantum Geographic Information System (QGIS) tool is used to visualize, navigate, manipulate, and analyze geographic crime datasets.

Investigating psychologically motivated crimes: The work of the SAPS Investigative Psychology Unit

The investigation of crimes like serial murder and serial rape requires both experience and proficient detective work. It also requires specialist knowledge to identify the psychological and criminological elements of a serial offence. Within the SAPS, there is a specialist unit that deals with psychologically motivated crimes – the Investigative Psychology Unit (IPU). This article draws attention to the contribution the unit makes to the investigation and prosecution of serial crimes in South Africa.

Elephants in the Station House: Serial Crimes, Wrongful Convictions, and Expanding Wrongful Conviction Analysis to Include Police Investigation

In this article we advocate that the study of miscarriages of justice be expanded to view the entirety of police crime investigation as a source of wrongful convictions. We set this proposal in a framework of how the inductive innocence paradigm was developed and analyze how the term “causation” is used in legal, scientific and case analysis. We then explore a subject not yet addressed by wrongful conviction scholarship but that may confront an investigator: whether an unsolved crime is the work of a serial criminal and whether a suspect is the serial criminal. We examine a convenience sample of forty-four exonerees convicted of crimes committed by thirty serial criminals. The analysis is aimed at opening up a discussion of the kind of complexity that investigators face in hard-to-solve cases.