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Cyberpath to Psychopaths CLUE-FINDING COMPUTER BLOODHOUND IS THE POLICEMAN'S NEW BEST FRIEND. You're the guy next door who commits serial crimes. One day in your mailbox, you find a composite sketch of your face, a psychological profile, a deseription of your lifestyle and a summary of the gruesome crimes you've committed. Your neighbors receive similar flyers. They are alarmed by the similarities between you and the person described on the flyer, and they call the police. Direct marketing is now a law enforcement tool, at least in Vancouver. There, a home-grown computerized geographic profiling systern enables police to zero in on where a serial criminal is most likely to live by drawing on aerial photographs, land use records, topographical information and other geographical data, which, until now, have been used primarily to develop maps for forestry, mining and resource development. "We can profile an area where the offender likely lives and do a mail-out asking residents for information," says Det. Insp. Kim Rossmo, head of the Vancouver Police Department's new Geographic Profiling Section, who helped develop the system. "People are more likely to respond because it is close to home. And how often have you heard that so and so looked like the sketch but the neighbor or relative never thought they were capable of committing the crime? "We've even been successful getting mail-outs into the offender's home, with interesting results," says Rossmo, who declined to elaborate on what those results were. The police program, called Orion, merges geographic information system (GIS) data with clues from other sources including psychological profiles, aerial photos, postal codes, motor vehicle licensing information, letters criminals have sent to taunt police or victims; census data and land-use records. When all the information is compiled, the computer calculates various algorithms to produce a so-called "jeopardy surface" - a three-dimensional, multi-colored map that "gives you an optimal searching path for the area," Rossmo says. The map enables the police to put squad cars in strategic locations, focus searches in targeted areas and avoid expensive, ineffective searches. "Often these cases suffer from information overload. Orion helps police winnow information down to what is relevant. It helps focus an investigation," he adds. Rossmo began developing an early prototype of what is now Orion as an offshoot of a doctorate he earned at Simon Fraser University. At Simon Fraser, environmental criminologists Paul and Patricia Brantingham had developed a model showing where a criminal lives affects where he is likely to commit a crime. "So I went at it the other way, to sec if you could predict where a criminal lives based on the type of crimes he has committed .... Most offenders commit crimes in their 'comfort zone,' which is often not far from where they live." The RCMP has signed a contract to buy the system from the Vancouver company, Environinental Criminology Research, which markets Orion. A Vancouver-based RCMP officer will begin a year of training with Rossmo in September to learn the system, and the two will continue to work in tandem after that. Ontario Provincial Police are also reported to be "very interested" in the systern. Det. Insp. Kate Lines of the Ontario Provincial Police's behaviorial sciences unit says the OPP is interested in buying the software and has a proposal to do so before management. The goal, she says, is to have a profiler like Rossmo within the unit. Insp. Ron MacKay, who headed the RCMP's Ottawa-based violent crime analysis branch until his recent retirement at the end of June, says two other officers based in Ottawa and Winnipeg will be trained on the system and work on it part-time in addition to their duties in psychological profiling. The Orion system is compatible with the RCMP's Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System (ViCLAS), a database of violent crimes and violent criminals that links crimes committed over a period of time or in apparently unrelated locations. MacKay and Rossmo have already paired the two systems to collaborate on investigations. The combination of the two lead to the arrest of a British Columbia suspect accused in 24 cases of arson. Once ViCLAS linked the fires, MacKay developed a psychological profile that turned out to be "quite accurate" which was fed into the Orion system. "Kirn was able to identify the key area down to 0.02%. The person arrested lived across the street from the area identified," MacKay says. The RCMP will pay about $225,000 to purchase the software and three Sun UltraSPARC-based workstations. "You can blow that much on one investigation," he says. Rossmo has been swamped with requests from other forces for Orion's assistance in investigating serial crimes. He is using it to help police in Britain investigate a series of rapes, and recently retumed from New York where, for three years, a rapist on Manhattan's east side has been attacking women as they return home from work. It takes about two weeks to run a case. Rossmo hopes the time will be reduced as the software is refined. "lf I had nothing else to do, I don't think 1 could handle more than 20 cases a year, but these are all major cases," he says. Rossmo speculates that the system might have helped police in Ontario link a series of rapes in Scarborough with the sex murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French in St. Catharines, had it been in place when the police were searching for Paul Bernardo. "The key is to be able to link the crimes together in the first place," he says, adding that computers can't replace solid police work; they just provide additional investigation tools. "The whole investigative process is about the intelligent collection and analysis of information. When police are faced with a huge volume of information and limited resources, they have to make the best use of that information. "This is one more tool," Rossmo says. Laura Ramsay, Canada, Financial Post

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