Banksy was ‘geoprofiled’ like a criminal
But new research that ‘outed’ him could track terrorists
If you’re a Taliban fighter and you want to explode a few homemade bombs, you generally plant them within a certain range of your house. That, at least, is what an investigative technique called geoprofiling tells us about the patterns of insurgents, terrorists or serial criminals.
And if you’re the international art-world star and graffiti artist, Banksy? You might do roughly the same thing.
Last week, researchers published a study that found a correlation between the locations of Banksy’s street art and a man named Robin Gunningham, a Bristol, UK resident who was identified as the elusive artist by a newspaper investigation in 2008.
The researchers looked at Banksy’s artworks, and through geoprofiling’s sophisticated statistical analysis, found certain “hot spots” that corresponded with Gunningham — including a pub and soccer fields — suggesting he and Banksy are one and the same. (The Gunningham family denies this.)
Banksy is a pseudonymous street art phenom whose work sells for $1 million plus. But some critics contend he’s a vandal — a designation his work exploits and invites. Banksy has managed to remain a mystery, and now geoprofiling is boosting his criminal mystique, even as it threatens to undercut it.
Geoprofiling began, in earnest, in the early 1990s in Vancouver, British Columbia, where a detective named Kim Rossmo developed the system to track repeat offenders. The concept works like this: Investigators input data from crime sites into a computer algorithm that then calculates where a potential criminal is likely to live. The system has since been adopted by investigative forces around the world, including the FBI and the UK’s National Crime Agency, often replacing psychological profiling, which investigators believe is less fruitful.
Now, Rossmo says, he believes the system can do more than catch serial criminals. He co-authored last week’s paper to draw attention to geoprofiling’s potential to fight terrorism before it happens. “Our analysis highlights areas associated with one prominent candidate (e.g., his home), supporting his identification as Banksy,” the paper concluded. “More broadly, these results support previous suggestions that analysis of minor terrorism-related acts (e.g., graffiti) could be used to help locate terrorist bases before more serious incidents occur, and provides a fascinating example of the application of the model to a complex, real-world problem.”
In other words, terrorists leave tags that could provide clues. And, like Banksy, they don’t want to be found, either.
