Connecting the dots : utilising crime scripting to leverage multimodal data and innovative techniques in a meaningful manner

Abstract:The growing availability of new and emerging data sources (e.g. mobile phone data, social media data, and open access administrative data) offer promising avenues for crime related research. For today’s generation of researchers, the challenge appears to lie less in accessing rich datasets than in creating value from them. With the development of powerful computational techniques, such as those emerging from the field of artificial intelligence, the focus is on formulation of useful hypotheses, and meaningful organisation of knowledge. Thus, the question remains how these multimodal data can be placed in context to create value from it and how to organise knowledge in a meaningful way so that innovative techniques can leverage it. This article discusses the potential value of using crime scripting to put data in context and utilise novel techniques for the purpose of problem-oriented and intelligence-led crime reduction. Crime scripting is an analytical method for generating, organising, and systematising knowledge about the procedural aspects and procedural requirements of crime commission. Here, crime scripting acts as a generic knowledge structure (or ‘backbone’ method), where the dots with multimodal data and innovative techniques are connected.

Publication year:2025

Accessibility:Open