PDF (Portable Document Format) - Chaosradio - CCC

Monty Cantsin, Editor in Chief, Smile Magazine,
http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html
Cyberpath to Psychopaths
CLUE-FINDING COMPUTER
BLOODHOUND IS THE POLICEMAN’S
NEW BEST FRIEND.
You’re the guy next door who commits serial
crimes. One day in your mailbox, you find a
composite sketch of your face, a
psychological profile, a description of your
lifestyle and a summary of the gruesome
crimes you’ve committed. Your neighbors
receive similar flyers. They are alarmed by
the similarities between you and
the person described on the flyer,
and they call the police.
Direct marketing is now a law
enforcement tool, at least in
Vancouver. There, a home-grown
computerized geographic
profiling system enables police to
zero in on where a serial criminal
is most likely to live by drawing
on aerial photographs, land use
records, topographical information
and other geographical data,
which, until now, have been used
primarily to develop maps for
forestry, mining and resource
development.
„We can profile an area where the offender
likely lives and do a mail-out asking residents
for information,“ says Det. Insp. Kim
Rossmo, head of the Vancouver Police
Department’s new Geographic Profiling
Section, who helped develop the system.
„People are more likely to respond because it
is close to home. And how often have you
Die Datenschleuder
Nummer 60, September 1997
heard that so and so looked like the sketch
but the [neighbor or relative] never thought
they were capable of committing the crime?
„We’ve even been successful getting mailouts
into the offender’s home, with
interesting results,“ says Rossmo, who
declined to elaborate on what those results
were.
The police program, called Orion, merges
geographic information system (GIS) data
with clues from other sources including
psychological profiles, aerial photos, postal
codes, motor vehicle licensing information,
letters criminals have sent to taunt police or
victims; census data and land-use records.
When all the information is compiled, the
computer calculates various algorithms to
produce a so-called „jeopardy surface“ - a
three-dimensional, multi-colored map that
„gives you an optimal searching path for the
area,“ Rossmo says.