Bonnie Veno

This research compared three widely available software applications that can be used by law enforcement personnel to estimate an offender's home location based upon his or her crime series pattern. Rigel Analyst, a commercial application, and two publicly funded applications, Crime Analysis Spatial Extension (CASE), and CrimeStat III were examined. The fundamental differences in the underlying strategies of the software were investigated. The software was then compared in terms of the data requirements, accuracy of results, ease of use and the ease of interpretation of the final output. Data for this research were provided by Peel Regional Police, which included 40 serial break and enter offenders from 20002006. Results of the comparison of the three applications found that Rigel Analyst performed only slightly better than CrimeStat and CASE at estimating an offender's home location. Overall though, there was very little difference between the applications in terms of accuracy.