Crime Scene Locations in Criminal Homicides: A Spatial Crime Analysis in a GIS Environment

摘要

Law enforcement agencies recently have recognized the significance and impact that comes from a better understanding of the dynamics of crime in a geographical perspective. In particular, due to its complex nature, analyzing criminal homicide is often challenging when connecting multiple locations to persons involved in crimes in order to solve cases. The main purpose of this study is to provide an analytical framework to understand criminal homicide from a socio-geographical perspective using GIS. This chapter explores how social relationships between victims and offenders, and the spatial characteristic of a community, affect the geographical pattern of underlying locations in criminal homicides. We propose a conceptual model named Spatial Configurations of Homicide Crime (SCHC), which categorizes sequences of homicides from a geographical perspective. The spatial configurations of criminal homicides is denned by combinations of locations including: Offender's residence (O), Victim's residence (V), Murder location (M), and Disposal location of victim (D), all of which are expressed as a set of (O, V, M, D). The relationships between SCHC and (1) social relationships among victims and offenders, (2) the context of the crimes, and (3) the ethnic composition of people within a community, are analyzed with Multinomial Logit Models (MNL). Based on geospatial analysis using GIS, this chapter identifies the critical socio-geographic factors and reveals the structure of locational components in homicidal crimes. A case study with more than 300 homicide incidents in Hillsborough County, Florida from 1997 to 2007 demonstrates social relationships among victims and offenders in their geographical locations.