CCJ6079 Geospatial Crime Analysis

Introduction

To introduce, violent criminal activities are among the most severe problems facing the USA. Studies show that 14000 people died of homicide in the country in 2013.  69% of them were attributed to firearms. Although there are also a great number of crime types, this study deals with the residential armed robberies in New York City.

Literature Review

Crime is a universal problem across the globe and it is usually conducted unlawfully. A few studies have been conducted on residential armed robberies as compared to other types of crime types. This crime type occurs when an offender takes something from someone forcefully with the use of firearms such as a gun.

The objectives

This study aimed at using geospatial technology or GIS for mapping residential armed robberies in New York City. The study answered the following questions:

1. Where are the residential crime hotspots and coldspots?  Hotspots mean areas with the highest clusters of crimes whereas coldspots show areas of low crime rates. Crime rates vary from one place to another due to security variation among other factors.
2. Which boroughs in New York City have the highest occurrences of residential armed robberies?
3. Where are the locations for the criminal activities occurring within 500 feet from the highway transits?. Usually, roads enable criminals to escape before they are nabbed.

The study area.

The map shows the study area as enclosed by the purple rectangle. It shows the location of New York City in the USA

Methodology

The data showing the criminal activities in New York City was downloaded from the data. world repository. It was in the CSV format but was converted in the ArcMap platform to a shapefile format. The data showed records of various crime types but was filtered using a query in the attribute table to show only those showing the residential armed robberies. There were 2115 occurrences. The optimized hot spots tool in ArcMap was used to generate hotspots and coldspots of crimes in the area. The output showed the statistical significance of the hotspots and coldspots at 90, 95, and 99%. To answer the second question, the borough's polygon was joined to the crime occurrences point shapefiles. The join was based on spatial location. This generated the number of criminal activities per borough. Finally, a buffer analysis was used to find the crimes occurring within 500 feet from the highway transits. Those crime occurrences within the buffers were selected (Using select by locations the crimes within the buffer).

Findings

The Bronx and the New York boroughs were the main crime hotspots at a 99% significance level. Some areas showed no statistically significant crime clusters. The Kings and Bronx also had the highest crime occurrences. After the performance of buffer analysis and the selection of points within the buffer, the results showed that all the residential armed robberies occurred within the buffers (500 feet from the highway transits). This means they occurred near the highway transits.

Policy implications

The outcome indicated that the areas with the highest crime occurrences and those showing the statistically significant hotspots should be given priority on fighting the criminal activities. These included the New York, The Kings, and Bronx boroughs. Furthermore, police officers should be staged at the highways since the criminal activities concentrate close to the road networks.

Limitation.

It is always vital to carry out scientific studies in synchrony with the procedures and thresholds used by other scientists unless it is a novelty (new study). This study used 500 feet to indicate areas close to the road. This however had no scientific backing. It is thus imperative to search for the commonly used buffer distance for related studies.

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