The university professor who termed the phrase 'geographic profiling' and helped police track down the Washington sniper in 2002 will be giving a public lecture at a national conference at the University of Regina this week.

The conference, which has attracted police, criminologists, social workers and students from across Canada, is the National Summer Institute for Statistical and GIS Analysis of Crime and Justice Data. It's taking place at the University of Regina June 19-25 and is sponsored by Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) and Statistics Canada.

There will be two free public lectures.

The first will be on Tuesday, June 21 at 7 p.m. in the Education Building, Room 193.

Jeffrey Pfeifer, U of R professor of psychology and the director of the Canadian Institute for Peace, Justice and Security, will present the lecture "Crime and Statistics: Bringing the Numbers to Life."

During the past decade, police services have begun to experience a barrage of statistical information including crime rates, and victimization and offender demographics. Although it is clear that this information can provide police services with potential insight, there is an increasing risk that the aggregate statistical data may lose some of its effectiveness when examined out of context. The Supreme Court of Canada has recently cited some of the research of Pfeifer, who is the Law Foundation of Saskatchewan Chair in Police Studies. 

The second public lecture will be Friday, June 24 at 7 p.m. in the Classroom Building, Room 112. 

Kim Rossmo, research professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Texas State University and director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation, will give the lecture "Geographic Profiling: Spatial Patterns of Criminal Predators."

Stranger violent and sexual crimes are difficult to solve. Their investigation can produce hundreds of tips and suspects, resulting in information overload. Police need effective methods to manage and prioritize the information so resources can be efficiently deployed. One such tactic is geographic profiling, an investigative methodology that uses crime sites to determine the likely area of offender residence. This is accomplished through the production of probability surfaces that are integrated with geographic information system (GIS) street maps of the crime areas. 

Rossmo, who worked in the police service before studying for his PhD in Criminology at Simon Fraser University, takes a geographic perspective to crime. He developed the Criminal Geographic Targeting model (CGT) and termed the phrase 'geographic profiling.' Many police agencies use his computerized geo-mapping techniques and in 2002 Rossmo helped investigators in the case of the Washington-area sniper.

The goal of the National Summer Institute, which will be held at the U of R this summer and in the summers of 2006 and 2007, is to advance the training of participants in the statistical and geographical information systems analysis of crime and justice data.

For more information, go to the website www.uregina.ca/arts/NSI.