SINAS: Suspect Investigation Using Offenders’ Activity Space

Abstract

Suspect investigation as a critical function of policing determines the truth about how a crime occurred, as far as it can be found. Understanding of the environmental elements in the causes of a crime incidence inevitably improves the suspect investigation process. Crime pattern theory concludes that offenders, rather than venture into unknown territories, frequently commit opportunistic and serial violent crimes by taking advantage of opportunities they encounter in places they are most familiar with as part of their activity space. In this paper, we present a suspect investigation method, called SINAS, which learns the activity space of offenders using an extended version of the random walk method based on crime pattern theory, and then recommends the top-K potential suspects for a committed crime. Our experiments on a large real-world crime dataset show that SINAS outperforms the baseline suspect investigation methods we used for the experimental evaluation.