Offender characteristics are the central theme in crime analysis. Crime analysis involves inquiry, investigation, close examination, and scrutinizing of information. It demands a focused and systematic review of the felony and criminal issues. It also relies on theories and data collection methods of social science. Crime analysis addresses crimes and issues such as rape, robbery, burglary, and suspicious activities, among others, including supporting information associated with the nature of the crime, the offenders, and victims. The present paper focuses on the various characteristics of crime and their relevance to crime analysis. The main categories examined in the paper include social demographic, spatial, and temporal. Social demographics entail general personal or group characteristics, for instance, sex, age, income, race, and education. When analyzing crime on an individual level, the analysts can use social demographic information in the identification of crime suspects and victims (Bogomolov et al., 2014). In the case of a group, social demographic information is essential in identifying group characteristics and their relation to crime. With social demographic information, the analyst can determine the social features of the offender, such as age, gender, race, hair color, etc. In a group setting, the social demographic information is vital in determining the differences between groups in cases of victimization. The spatial information forms the central tool in understanding the nature of the crime. Thanks to the computer era, there is technology, electronic data, and other advancements that facilitate spatial analysis in crime. Spatial analysis uses visual crime displays, mapping, and other related events. The factor of geographical features is also crucial in determining the nature of crime/disorder in which criminology research encourages analysts to understand the geographical nature of the crime (Santos, 2016). Spatial data help the analyst understand the nature of crime and related events and understand the connection between unlike data depending on geographic variables and actual maps for result analysis. The analyst understands the situation that links the offender and the victim in terms of time and space. Temporal information is another crime analysis tool. Analysts undertake various approaches in temporal analysis, such as crime trend examination to determine seasons, days, and time of the offense. The first approach is to examine crime trends over several years and understand crime nature in seasonal terms. The second strategy involves determining the short-term crime trends in terms of the time of the day and the day of the week and the time difference between related incidences in crime series. The above approaches are interconnected by the geographical information system, which offers the visualization of spatial information and temporal data in three dimensions (Rossmo, 2017). These forms of data are significant in criminal apprehension, reduction, prevention, and evaluation. They are the critical areas of information that crime analysts focus on during their crime analysis.
Conclusion
All criminal offenders are associated with either of the three crime characteristics, including social geographic, spatial, and temporal information. All three tools are the major pillars in crime analysis. Social, geographical information focuses on the offenders’ personal and group characteristics in terms of sex, age, income, race, and education. Spatial data is supported by technology and is vital in crime visual displays and crime mapping. The temporal data focus on crime trend and offers the analyst an understanding of the criminal nature seasonally. All three analytic approaches help understand the nature of the crime itself, the offender, and the victim.
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References
Bogomolov, A., Lepri, B., Staiano, J., Oliver, N., Pianesi, F., & Pentland, A. (2014). Once upon a crime: towards crime prediction from demographics and mobile data. In Proceedings of the 16th international conference on multimodal interaction (pp. 427-434). ACM.
Rossmo, D. K. (2017). Place, space, and police investigations: Hunting serial violent criminals. In Principles of Geographical Offender Profiling (pp. 165-180). Routledge.
Santos, R. B. (2016). Crime analysis with crime mapping . Sage publications.
