David Canter (2) (1944–)

Author David Canter, one of the pioneers of so-called geographic profiling of crime, details in Mapping Murder quite stirring cases of (mostly) serial crimes and how geographical profiling helped catch the perpetrator. The mathematical theory behind his geographical profiling is never explained in the book, but it may be some kind of kernel density modeling where each crime spot is convolved with a local kernel. Canter shows that the spot where the criminal dwell is usually the site with the highest density from the combined kernels. As such it is not really rocket science, but rather a simple useful technique that helps the police priotizing suspects. Canter has overseen one implementation of a program - Dragnet - to this kind of analysis and some of the figures in the book are probably output from the program. One chapter is lifted off a lecture he gave, and his speculations there seems a bit out of place compared to the rest of the book. The book is from 2003 and one of the cases Canter describes is the assasination of celebrity Jill Dando, the use of geographic profiling and the subsequent catch and conviction of a man. It is not updated on the latest twists in this case: the man appealed and was acquitted, and in 2009 a drunken Serb boasted about killing Dando. This case shows that geographic profiling does not give strong enough evidence for a conviction - rather it can only point to suspects whose involvement in the crime must be established by other means. In Dando's case the other means was gunshot residues, and that evidence was ruled unsafe in the court of appeal.… (meer)