A student paper explaining a new method for tracking the likely routes of criminals on crime sprees has won a Best Paper award at the 2011 European Intelligence and Security Information conference.

Authored by math undergraduate Natalia Iwanski and criminology graduate student Richard Frank, the paper, Analyzing an Offender’s Journey to Crime: A Criminal Movement Model (CriMM), was selected from among 260 entries.

The students used five years of RCMP crime data on property offences in Burnaby, Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam to study criminals’ travel paths from their homes to the scene of their crimes. The students then developed CriMM to simulate criminals’ likely travel routes from their homes to major criminal attractors, such as shopping malls.

“The goal was to analyze how far off their regular path criminals will go to commit crimes,” explains Frank. “In our simulations, we found that about half will commit their crimes within two blocks of their regular travel route.”

The students will use their model and research to shed new light on criminals’ movements and anticipate areas in which they are likely to commit crimes.

Their research was supported by SFU’s Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies and MoCSSy (Modelling of Complex Social Systems).