Abstract
The majority of geographical profiling research focuses on the relationship between offender and location, which works particularly well when a burial site is known. In real-world investigations, however, burial or dump sites are often not known. The aim of the current paper is to outline a relatively under-used method of geographic profiling: Winthropping. While the method has been around for several decades, few studies have provided any research findings using it. There are two likely reasons for Winthropping being under-used: first, it has not been clearly, theoretically explained; second, given its relative novelty, it may not be immediately clear how to use it in research and real-world scenarios. The current paper outlines several key psychological (e.g., satisficing and affordances) and criminological (e.g., rational choice theory and crime geometry) theories that may explain why Winthropping works. Case studies are provided, and a methodological approach (matrix forecasting) is then provided to show how it could work in research practice and real-world applications. Overall, Winthropping is deemed to be highly useful, and it is hoped that experts in the field will begin developing this tool for wider, applied use.
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Notes
Moses (2019) made a compelling case for Winthropping within Forensic Archaeology; however, the current paper provides a fuller account from the Psychological and Criminological perspectives.
A Freedom of Information application can be found; however, the Government response was to neither confirm nor deny the use of the method. The current paper, therefore, attempts to rebuild possibly theoretical underpinnings of the method, so that it may be studied and developed by researchers in the area.
A number of psychological studies also point to the fact that humans are typically very bad at understanding randomness and very bad at making truly random choices. For example, if you ask someone to imagine a die is rolled 5 times, and write the outcomes, few would write “1, 2, 3, 4, 5” though it is equally likely/as random as “2, 1, 4, 3, 5,” which appears more random. Therefore, a criminal attempting to appear ‘random’ is unlikely to be truly random.
This would be defined as a ‘false’ affordance—an object giving the appearance of a use or affordance when in fact it cannot be used in that way.
Further details of the case cannot be published, for obvious reasons of maintaining case integrity. We also appreciate that anecdotes are a poor form of evidence; however, it is provided here as an illustration of how RCT for location selection can be applied.
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Keatley, D., O’Donnell, C., Chapman, B. et al. The Psycho-criminology of Burial Sites: Developing the Winthropping Method for Locating Clandestine Burial Sites. J Police Crim Psych 37, 91–100 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-021-09457-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-021-09457-8