Coding A Murderer

Discover how algorithms put serial killers at the centre of the map. Tamsin Oxford investigates the Murder Accountability Project and its open source hunt for murderers…

It took one journalist, a story on prostitution, a passion for open source software, and an old, yet powerful database, to create the Murder Accountability Project (MAP, www.murderdata.org). The MAP involves finding serial killers, preventing murders and connecting the statistical dots. It’s also a project that has a fascinating back story.

Thomas Hargrove, the founder of MAP, had purchased a uniform crime report from the University of Missouri while doing research on a story about prostitution in 2004. The university threw in the Supplemental Homicide Report at no extra cost, as you do, and this free, data-heavy document changed the course of Thomas’s life.

“The document contained row after row of information about individual murders that covered everything from the month, the year the murder happened, and the jurisdiction,” says Thomas. “The file also contained data around the age, sex, method of killing, race and the police theory around the killing, plus the offender’s details if the information was available. The moment I saw this file I was asking myself one very important question: would it be possible to use this data to teach a computer to detect serial murders? Could I use open source tools to build a platform that enables people to access this data and understand it in ways that allow for these murders to be solved more effectively?”