Developing a GIS based crime analysis system

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have a lot of applications that are getting more and more importance in our daily life. One of the hot and crucial application areas of GIS is crime mapping. Nowadays, crime rates tend to increase and thus analyzing the crime trends and taking preventive precautions are very important. Often, crimes display spatial or temporal patterns. For instance, some crime types are committed in some areas with a relatively higher density rate. Some others may occur in particular time ranges in a day. Adding geographic support to crime analysis methods can provide extremely valuable and exclusive benefits which tabular or statistical analyses cannot provide. For example, seeing the spatial distribution of a particular crime type or comparing different types of crimes on the map can give critical and important decision making tips for managers. Hence, adding spatial dimension to crime analysis techniques help provide great contributions to police departments.In this study, after doing some researches about crime mapping, a GIS-based crime analysis system, namely Crime Analyzer, has been developed from scratch. Crime Analyzer not only provides various spatial and temporal analysis tools but also presents a flexible method to extract data from various sources such as database systems to solve crime mapping problems.Keywords: GIS Based Crime Analysis, Crime Mapping Software