Applied Crime Analysis: A Social Science Approach to Understanding Crime, Criminals, and Victims

Wayne Petherick

Jun 2014 · Elsevier

About this ebook

Most approaches to crime analysis focus on geographical crime mapping, which is helpful in identifying crime clusters and allocating police resources, but does not explain why a particular crime took place. Applied Crime Analysis presents a model that brings statistical anchoring, behavioral psychopathology, and victimology from the social sciences together with physical and crime scene evidence to provide a complete picture of crime. This hands-on guide takes theoretical principles and demonstrates how they can be put into practice using real case examples. In addition to covering key topics such as staged crime scenes, false reports, and criminal motivations, the book’s includes a final chapter on report writing, showing readers how to use their findings to successfully advance to prosecution and succeed in court.

• Presents a model that takes social science concepts, including statistical anchoring, behavioral psychopathology, and victimology and connects them with crime scene evidence to examine and analyze crime
• Puts crime analysis theory into practice with real-world examples highlighting important concepts and best practice
• Includes a report writing chapter to demonstrate how this approach can strengthen criminal cases and succeed in court
• Instructor materials include a Test Bank, Powerpoint lecture slides, and Instructor's Guide for each chapter

About the author

Wayne Petherick is Associate Professor of Criminology at Bond University in Australia. Wayne’s areas of interest include forensic criminology, forensic victimology, criminal motivations, criminal profiling, and applied crime analysis. He has worked on risk and threat cases, a mass homicide, stalking, rape, and a variety of civil suits involving premises liability and crime prevention. He has presented to audiences in Australia and abroad, and has published in a variety of areas including social science and legal works in the areas of criminal profiling, expert evidence, stalking, serial crimes, criminal motivations, and victimology. Wayne is co-editor of Forensic Criminology, and editor of Profiling and Serial Crime: Theoretical and Practical Issues, now in its third edition.