Abstract:

" Crime linkage and offender profiling are areas of particular concern for law enforcement agencies worldwide when investigating serious criminal offences, in particular Serious Sexual Assault. Establishing a link between offences is regarded as highly significant in identifying the offender; evidence from the scenes of different crimes can then be aggregated in order to build a more complete picture of the suspect and new lines of enquiry can open. Research over the years has produced a number of models that provide a formal framework for classifying offender behaviour, but these tend to restrict this behaviour to a number of well-defined types which suffer from the inadequacy of the classical or ‘crisp set’ paradigm. Complex events like crimes cannot be described satisfactorily in this way. The actual case is far more fluid in that certain behaviour can be distributed over a number of different types with a different degree of importance. Artificial Intelligence techniques, in particular Fuzzy Inferencing, provide a framework that can classify behaviour in terms of different degrees of importance and provide a means to measure the differences between different occurrences of the same crime. "