Next

This chapter argues that crime pattern analysis can advance from tacit expertise to a shared diagnostic discipline by adopting structured classification – taxonomy, typology, and ontology – analogous to medicine’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and psychology’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM.) A diagnostic approach treats reports, witness statements, and physical evidence as “symptoms,” organizes recurring variables (offender, victim, place, time, method, sequence) with agreed criteria, and iteratively tests rival hypotheses until a pattern is confirmed. Taxonomy standardizes what happened; typology explains variation in motive and context; ontology links elements and their relationships across the full crime timeline, enabling transparent reasoning and machine-readable knowledge. The chapter outlines how an ontology operationalizes linkage (MO micro-variables, environmental cues), supports AI tools without ceding human judgment, and provides an implementation path – pilot, validate, refine – for agencies. The result is a reproducible, ethical, and scalable framework that turns experience into durable knowledge for prevention, investigation, and policy.