You're the guy next door who commits serial crimes. One day in your mailbox, you find a composite sketch of your face, a psychological profile, a description of your lifestyle and a summary of the gruesome crimes you've committed. Your neighbors receive similar flyers. They are alarmed by the similarities between you and the person described on the flyer, and they call the police.
Direct marketing is now a law enforcement tool, at least in Vancouver.
There, a home-grown computerized geographic profiling system enables police to zero in on where a serial criminal is most likely to live by drawing on aerial photographs, land use records, topographical information and other geographical data, which, until now, have been used primarily to develop maps for forestry, mining and resource development. Kim Rossmo, head of the Vancouver Police Department's new Geographic Profiling Section, who helped develop the system. People are more likely to respond because it is close to home. The map enables the police to put squad cars in strategic locations, focus searches in targeted areas and avoid expensive, ineffective searches. Often these cases suffer from information overload.