Locating Central Actors in Co-offending Networks

A co-offending network is a network of offenders who have committed crimes together. Recently different researches have shown that there is a fairly strong concept of network among offenders. Analyzing these networks can help law enforcement agencies in designing more effective strategies for crime prevention and reduction. One of the important tasks in co-offending network analysis is central actors identification. In this paper, firstly we introduce a data model, called unified crime data model to bridge the conceptual gap between abstract crime data level and co-offending network mining level. Using this data model, we extract the co-offending network of five years real-world crime data. Then we apply different variations of centrality methods on the extracted network and discuss how key player identification and removal can help law enforcement agencies in policy making for crime reduction.