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21 J. Quantitative Criminology 1 (2005)

handle is hein.journals/jquantc21 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 21, No. 1, March 2005 (© 2005) DOI: 10.1007/s10940-004-1785-4 On the Complexity and Accuracy of Geographic Profiling Strategies Brent Snook,''5 Michele Zito,2 Craig Bennell,3 and Paul J. Taylor4 Geographic profilers have access to a repertoire of strategies for predicting a serial offender's home location. These strategies range in complexity some in- volve more calculations to implement than others and the assumption often made is that more complex strategies will outperform simpler strategies. In the present study, we tested the relationship between the complexity and accuracy of 11 strategies. Data were crime site and home locations of 16 UK residential burglars who had committed 10 or more crimes each. The results indicated that strategy complexity was not positively related to accuracy. This was also found to be the case across tasks that ranged in complexity (where complexity was determined by the number of crimes used to make a prediction). Implications for police' policies and procedures, as well as our understanding of human decision- making, are discussed. KEY WORDS: geographic profiling; complexity; accuracy; serial burglary; CrimeStat, decision-making. 1. INTRODUCTION An implicit assumption in decision-making research is that more complex decision-making strategies lead to more accurate predictions (Brehmer, 1994; Hammond, 1990; Hogarth, 1980; Kahneman and Tversky, 1973). Complex strategies make more calculations when presented with information, and because they take into account extra information and appear to evaluate it in a more sophisticated fashion, they are often assumed 'Psychology Department, Science Building, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL, Canada, A1B 3X9. 2Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK. 3Department of Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. 4School of Psychology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK. 5To whom correspondence should be addressed. Phone: + 1-709-737-3101; E-mail: bsnook@ play.psych.mun.ca 1 0748-4518/05/0300-0001/0 © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

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