Buffer Zone
Definition
The area immediately around an offender's anchor point where offence probability is suppressed because the offender avoids committing crimes near recognisable locations such as home or workplace.
- Location
- Immediately around an offender's anchor point (home or workplace)
- Primary driver
- Offender's fear of being recognized by neighbors
Common questions
Why don't offenders commit crimes near their home or workplace?+
An offender typically avoids committing crimes very close to recognizable locations like their home or workplace because they fear being recognized by neighbors. This creates a suppressed zone around their anchor points where the probability of offending is much lower.
What is a buffer zone in geographical profiling?+
A buffer zone is the small ring of area immediately surrounding an offender's anchor point, such as home or workplace, where they deliberately avoid committing crimes. The suppressed offending in this zone is driven by the offender's anxiety about being identified by people who know them.
How does a buffer zone help investigators?+
Recognizing a buffer zone helps investigators profile an offender's likely residence or workplace. Because offenders suppress activity near their anchor points, actual crimes typically occur further away, allowing profilers to estimate where the offender might live or work based on the geographic pattern of offenses.
Related terms
- 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...
- Anchor Point
- The offender's spatial base of operations, most often the home, sometimes the workplace or a partner's address. The point geographical profiling is...
- Circle Hypothesis
- David Canter and Paul Larkin's 1993 hypothesis that for marauder offenders, the anchor point falls within the circle defined by the two...
- Commuter
- An offender who travels from their anchor point into a geographically separate crime area to offend; the circle hypothesis does not reliably...
- Criminal Geographic Targeting (CGT)
- Kim Rossmo's algorithm for geographic profiling, incorporating a distance-decay function modified by a buffer-zone suppression factor; implemented commercially in the Rigel software.
- Distance Decay
- The empirical observation that the probability of an offence location decreases as distance from the offender's anchor point increases, reflecting the rising...
- 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...
- Geographic Profiling
- A spatial analysis technique originally developed by Kim Rossmo that predicts the likely home or anchor point of a serial offender from...
- Hit-Rate
- Performance metric for a geoprofile: the percentage of the search area that has to be examined before the anchor is found, lower...
- Marauder
- An offender who operates radially from a fixed anchor point, committing crimes within a radius around that point and returning to it...
- Rigel
- The commercial software implementing the CGT geographic profiling algorithm, developed by Environmental Criminology Research Inc. in Vancouver and licensed to law-enforcement agencies...
- 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...
Explained in these topics
- Geographic Profiling: Rossmo, Canter and the Jeopardy SurfaceThe area immediately around an offender's anchor point where offence probability is suppressed because the offender avoids committing crimes near recognisable...
- Geographical ProfilingThe small ring immediately around the anchor where offending is suppressed because the offender fears being recognised by neighbours.