Anchor Point
Definition
The offender's spatial base of operations, most often the home, sometimes the workplace or a partner's address. The point geographical profiling is trying to identify.
- Meaning
- Offender's spatial base of operations
- Most common location
- Home
- Alternate locations
- Workplace, partner's address
- Analytical target
- Geographical profiling
Common questions
Why does geographical profiling assume an offender has a fixed anchor point at all?+
Most serial offenders operate within a comfort zone shaped by everyday routine and familiarity with terrain, so their crime locations tend to cluster in a pattern that decays with distance from a base, rather than being spread randomly across an unfamiliar area.
Does identifying a probable anchor point tell investigators exactly where the offender lives?+
No. It produces a probability surface prioritising areas most likely to contain the base of operations, intended to focus limited investigative resources, not a precise address, and it is combined with other evidence rather than used alone.
Related terms
- Buffer Zone
- The area immediately around an offender's anchor point where offence probability is suppressed because the offender avoids committing crimes near recognisable locations...
- Distance-Decay Function
- The empirical pattern that offence frequency declines with distance from the offender's anchor point, after a small zone of avoidance close to...
- Hit-Rate
- Performance metric for a geoprofile: the percentage of the search area that has to be examined before the anchor is found, lower...
- Jeopardy Surface
- The probability map output of geographic profiling, rendered as a colour-coded topographic display where high-probability zones for the anchor point appear in...
- Routine Activity Theory
- A criminological framework developed by Cohen and Felson (1979) that explains property crime as the product of three converging elements: a motivated...