Data Mining Approaches to Criminal Career Analysis

— Narrative reports and criminal records are stored digitally across individual police departments, enabling the collection of this data to compile a nation-wide database of criminals and the crimes they committed. The compilation of this data through the last years presents new possibilities of analyzing criminal activity through time. Augmenting the traditional, more socially oriented, approach of behavioral study of these criminals and traditional statistics, data mining methods like clustering and prediction enable police forces to get a clearer picture of criminal careers. This allows officers to recognize crucial spots in changing criminal behaviour and deploy resources to prevent these careers from unfolding. Four important factors play a role in the analysis of criminal careers: crime nature, frequency, duration and severity. We describe a tool that extracts these from the database and creates digital profiles for all offenders. It compares all individuals on these profile...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICDM
• Authors: Jeroen S. de Bruin, Tim K. Cocx, Walter A. Kosters, Jeroen F. J. Laros, Joost N. Kok
• Keywords: Criminal, Criminal Careers, Criminal Records, Data Mining, ICDM 2006