連続放火の地理的プロファイリング―サークル仮説の妥当性の検討―

抄録

The purpose of this study was to examine the mechanism of the circle hypothesis, an important theory in geographic profiling. 478 arson cases committed by 40 criminals in Japan were analyzed. The analysis on the spatial data of the arson cases revealed that there are few buffer zones and proper crime distances in Japanese serial arsons. More importantly, the results showed that as crime scenes scattered farther and wider, the distance between the spatial average point of crime scenes and the home of the criminal separated farther away. Although the original circle theory assumes that the home of a criminal tends to locate around the center of a circle, the phenomena presented by this study did not support this assumption when the distributions of crime scenes were larger in scale. An alternative model for this phenomenon was proposed.