Where? Thinking More Specifically About Locations

Where does a crime occur? The street address is what an officer puts in a police report. "Where" is often a single "pin" placed on a map.

I used to wonder what "location" could be in cyberspace, until I worked on cyber-investigations and learned that IP addresses existed at real locations with street addresses. Yet the IP address itself matters as we build a case. It is a location that does things.

Where can be a defined area in the vicinity of a cell phone tower. Where was the suspect's phone at a certain time proximate to a crime?

When I was a crime analyst linking a series of rapes with an unknown assailant, I was distressed to find out that a type of location was left out of a police report, where knowing the type of location would have allowed me to link another crime to the series, earlier than I was able to do so. One rape in the series occurred in an elevator; another rape in the series took place in a stairway. These two locations are similar in that they are the means to get between floors in a building. Reporting locations types specifically IS important. The sooner we identity a sex crime series, the more likely we can apprehend the suspect and prevent another heinous crime.

Obviously, the answer to the  question "where?" is more than a street address. We have to think critically to use this variable of "location" most effectively in analysis.