The Crime Linkage International Network (C-LINK)
Originally funded by the Leverhulme Trust, C-LINK is an international network of academics and practitioners with a professional interest in crime linkage (including the University of Leicester’s Dr Matt Tonkin). Crime linkage is a technique that seeks to identify groups of crimes that have been committed by the same individual/s based on the behaviours demonstrated at the crime scene, and is a key part of law enforcement efforts to catch and convict those serial offenders that pose the greatest risk to society. C-LINK is dedicated to conducting high quality research on crime linkage and to enhancing the police’s ability to conduct crime linkage in practice.
Members of the network have conducted research on a range of person- and property-oriented offences, in collaboration with law enforcement agencies around the world. For example, C-LINK has developed statistical approaches to behaviourally linking serial sex offences, using data collected from five countries that represented the largest dataset ever amassed to investigate crime linkage (see journal articles: Using offender crime scene behaviour to link stranger sexual assaults: A comparison of three statistical approaches and Linking serial sexual offences: Moving towards an ecologically valid test of the principles of crime linkage).