What is Crime Linkage? Part 5 of 7 of the ‘What is Investigative Psychology?’ series

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Crime linkage is the practice of identifying which different offences were committed by the same offender. For example, if you have a whole lot of unsolved burglaries, you want to find out which

offences are attributable to the same person. That is because you might have some information about the perpetrator from one crime, for example a shoe print that points to a male with a certain

shoe size and weight. See if you could identify which other offences you think are linked to that same person. Perhaps some of those have other information about the burglar, such as a witness

seeing that he has a tattoo on one hand, and in this way you can put together more and more pieces of the puzzle. You now have good reasons to believe that the offender who is responsible for

this particular series is of a certain gender, weight, has a certain shoe size which might point to his approximate height, and he has a tattoo on one hand. If you allocate one of those pieces to the

wrong puzzle (i.e. to the wrong series of offences), you unnecessarily hinder the investigation, so it is important to link the right offences to the right person.....