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Section 1 - Project Recap

The phrase “cold-case” has no set definition, but rather is defined by respective police departments and is usually based on the assignment of resources from a police dep artment (

Smythe, 2009).

We define a homicide case as cold if after 72 hour s of report the case does not have a suspect identified. The bulk of cold-case homicides are not solved because a new piece of tangible evidence becomes available, like finding the murder weapon or a n ew latent fingerprint, but rather because someone comes forward with new information tying someone to the murder (Canter & Youngs, 2009). The Profiling Project (PP) became involved with the Seth Rich homicide after reading the Washingtonian story “DC Lobbyist Will Hire Actors to Reenact Seth Rich’s Murder”

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which ran March 2, 2017. The Profiling Project offered t o provide a volunteer and autonomous team of professionals and graduate students to review the case, offer insight, and with an u ltimate goal of providing the Washington, D.C. Police Department (MPD) with one, new, actionable piece of information. On May 8, 2017 PP accomplished its’ goal by locating an additional security camera at the Flagler Market which was observed on May 4, 2017 to have a clear view of the intersection of W St. NW and Flagler Place NW.

Our Process

After communicating our intent with MPD and ensuring no conflicts, PP established our governing principles, which were deemed our “Six’C’s” (Appendix A). With these principles, we endeavored to learn all we could about Seth and the events around his homicide through publicly available information. The goal of PP was to create as str ong a profile of Seth Rich as possible. That profile would then be compared to the various profil es of the t heories surrounding Seth’s death. PP understood that the bulk of our information would be second and third-hand accounts, reporting’s and statements. To assess validity of such information, PP established a weig hted tool (Appendix B) to give value to the credibility, reliability and validity of the statements and information reviewed. We conducted statement validity assessments for any st atements or inf ormation we were presented (See Appendix C for example). PP was given no special access to any materials, evidence or persons and due to case sensitivity, conducted only informal, limi ted interviews. The bulk of our report is based on statistics, prior research and Logos. Data was retrieved from DC Police Crime Mapping interface

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. The website allows the public to query historical and current data from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPDC) database for r eported crime statist ics. The team downloaded the data from all seven police districts, using the time parameters of 1/1/2012 - 4/6/17. All data were downloaded into Excel spreadsheets, merged into one file, and then exp orted into a statistical analysis software system, SPSS, for more thorough analyses. Data was organized by date of offense, type of offense, and police district.

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https://www.washingtonian.c om/2017/03/02/dc-lobbyist-will-hire-actors-to-reenact-seth-richs-mu rder/

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