VOLTAGE

In Dr. Jerry Ratcliffe's blog post, "How long division taught me to think about crime," he uses a term he calls VOLTAGE.

V -victims
O - offenders
L - locations
T - times
A - attractors
G - groups
E - enticers

He says: "In my training I use numerous structured approaches like this, including VOLTAGE. VOLTAGE is an extension of a simple analytical tool (VOLT) that has previously been used in some British police services as a framework for structuring knowledge about crime problems. Take a complicated crime problem and break it down into simpler components."

"Instead of just ‘thinking hard’ about a crime problem, it is better to think specifically about what we know about the victims, the offenders, the locations, the times, and so forth. It helps us identify what we know, and what we don’t know."

Read the blog post to find out more!