Offender’s Journey

Abstract

In the current study we develop a Criminal Movement Model (CriMM) to investigate the relationship between simulated travel routes of offenders along the physical road network and the actual locations of their crimes in the same geographic space. With knowledge of offenders’ home locations and the locations of major attractors, we are able to model the routes that offenders are likely to take when travelling from their home to an attractor by employing variations of Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm. With these routes plotted, we then compare them to the locations of crimes committed by the same offenders. This model was applied to five attractor locations within the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) in the province of British Columbia, Canada. Information about offenders in these cities was obtained from five years worth of real police data. After performing a small-scale analysis for each offender to investigate how far off their...