Your Code as a Crime Scene

Profiling the Ripper

We can figure out where Jack the Ripper’s home was with the following map. It was generated by Professor David Canter^[4] using Dragnet, a software developed by The Center for Investigative Psychology.^[5] Dragnet considers each crime location a center of gravity. It then combines the individual centers mathematically using one small twist; psychologically, all distances aren’t equal. Thus, the crime locations are weighted depending on their relative distances. That weighted result points to the geographical area most likely to contain the home base of the offender, also known as our hotspot. The hotspot is indicated by the central red area on the map. The resulting hotspot is gold for investigators because they can focus ...