August 23, 16:10-17:00 CEST

New Developments in Behavioural Crime Linkage Research

Serial offenders impose significant financial and human costs on society, making their detection and prosecution a priority for law enforcement agencies around the world. Crime linkage is one tool that can be used in this regard, as it seeks to identify offences that are behaviourally similar and, thus, likely to be committed by the same offender/s. Linking crimes to a common offender/s in this way allows the police to combine the evidence collected across multiple investigations, thereby increasing the quantity and quality of evidence with which to detect and prosecute offenders. 

Over the past two decades, a growing body of research has amassed to support the use of crime linkage during law enforcement investigations into a range of offences, including acquisitive (e.g. burglary, robbery and car theft) and person-oriented crimes (e.g. rape and murder). This is accompanied by the continued use of crime linkage by international law enforcement agencies, including agencies across Europe, North America, Africa, Asia and Australia. 

This symposium describes new developments in behavioural crime linkage research. This includes: research exploring the process of crime linkage with residential burglaries in New Zealand (presentation 1); research that explores new statistical approaches to crime linkage that utilise coincidence (presentation 2); research investigating the impact of Covid on the behaviour of sexual offenders, which has significant implications for crime linkage (presentation 3); and research that- for the first time- seeks to enhance crime linkage algorithms by incorporating contextual/situational information (presentation 4).