ISSN (Print) : 0974-6846

Indian Journal of Science and Technology, Vol 10(40), DOI: 10.17485/ijst/2017/v10i40/120079, October 2017 ISSN (Online) : 0974-5645

A Framework for Visual Representation of Crime

Information
Samiullah Shah*, Vijdan Khalique, Salahuddin Saddar and Naeem A. Mahoto
Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Jamshoro, Sindh, Pakistan; [email protected], vijdan.
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract
Objectives: This paper proposes a framework that transforms the structural crime related data into effective visual reports
to strengthen the pro-active activities of law enforcement agencies. Methods/Statistical Analysis: The information
visualization depends on the input data. The visualization engine, as proposed in this research work, processes all the
data to produce crime information instrumental for the law-enforcing agencies and present it in three different formats:
1) Statistically summarized reports in graphical formats, 2) Heat-maps of crimes and 3) Clusters of crime patterns
based on geo-locations. Findings: The visual crime analysis information may also help the policy-makers to gain depth
knowledge about crime types, their timings at certain regions. This insight knowledge may improve the performance of
law enforcement agencies in reducing crime rate and utilizing resources efficiently. Especially, it performs comprehensive
processing of crime information to detecting heat-maps of crimes, clustering crime patterns and presenting it by means of
information visualization techniques. Application/Improvements: Law enforcement agencies can use the system to have
comprehensive, consolidated and chronologically view of all types of reported criminal activities.

Keywords: Crime Information, Data Visualization, Heat Maps, Information Visualization

crime, the criminal activities and related data must be

1. Introduction stored and visually represented in such a way so that the
The growing need of technological solutions and usage concerned authorities may take actions pro-actively.
of web map services have increased data analysis much Analyzing huge crime data and finding accurate
popular1. Several application domains, such as water results with efficient methods is an open and challeng-
management, crime mapping, traffic analysis and disease ing task. The diversity in the geo-location and complex
analysis, use Geographic Information System (GIS) appli- series of crime patterns has made it more challenging
cations. Modern GIS systems embedded with web-based and difficult. Knowledge discovery helps to cope with
map services are essential to wide range of users for data such challenges by extracting desired analytical results
exploration1. from large databases. The primary need is the crime data
Crime analysis is among the major activities of intelli- on which knowledge discovery algorithms can work to
gence and law enforcement agencies all over the world2,14. provide suitable and relevant information. Eventually,
To prevent crimes and optimum usage of resources is the the analytical reports generated by knowledge discovery
prime concerned of the agencies2. This enquires the need system will help authorities to take decisive or preventive
of analytical systems that can provide knowledge to the approach for any unwanted situation.
law enforcing agencies. The extracted knowledge from This research aims to provide a framework for analysis
the available data regarding crime can assist in controlling of crime data. It proposes a framework that records all
the crime and finding out the sensitive regions in certain the criminal activities and crime reports on geographi-
locality where vigilance is required. In order to mitigate cal locations. Mapping crimes on maps according to the

*Author for correspondence

 A Framework for Visual Representation of Crime Information

geographical locations of their occurrence is called crime for crime analysis. The proposed framework has been
mapping. Crime mapping is a comprehensive and effec- comprehensively described in section 4. The research
tive approach to illustrate the criminal offenses5. This assumptions and constraints are reported in section 5.
research takes it to the next level where the geographical The detailed discussion of the outcomes of the proposed
locations and details of crime are processed to produce framework is reported in section 6 and finally section 6
knowledge for law-enforcement agencies. draws conclusions.

Figure 2. Proposed Framework.

Figure 1. Database Schema.

2. Literature
Crime maps are a common practice and these fre- The information representation, assisting crime analysis
quently show crime incidents as a point distribution on a and decision-making, has become an important activity
map. Each incident indicates where a crime occurred and for law enforcement agencies. There is a need of effective
very often these locations are the victims’ home addresses. implementation of the systems that can reveal the rate and
The proposed framework is a web-based system, which type of crime based on geographical locations in an inter-
aims at bridging the structured crime related data with active and concise manner. The existing literature reports
information visualization techniques. In particular, the different aspects and parameters for preventing crimes.
proposed framework allows storing crime related data into For example, the study12 presented a project to prevent the
structural format i.e., database. Later, the data has been crime through efficient environmental design. The study13
processed to produce visual results in order to analyze reviewed 14 articles related to crime places and suggested
crimes, crime patterns. Besides, the framework detects mutually supportive three perspectives in understanding
the crime heat-maps and also clusters the similar crime the crime: 1) Rational choice, 2) Routine activity and 3)
patterns using information visualization techniques. By Crime pattern.
exploring the current status of private geo-information Crime maps are a common practice and they fre-
disclosure, a basis has been created to achieve the second quently show crime incidents as a point distribution on a
aim of this research, which is to offer cartographic dis- map. Each incident indicates where a crime occurred and
play guidelines when crime data are presented on public very often these locations are the victims’ home addresses.
maps or disseminated among stakeholders. The research Having such geolocations of crime occurrences, the task
outputs shed light on the disclosure risks and current of analyzing crime becomes more demanding as more
practices and also assist potential “maskers” regarding the accuracy and precision is expected in the outcome. The
practical steps that are required to ensure that data are further relevant research work accomplished in crime
accurately visualized. analysis is given below.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section
2 reports the related existing literature for crime analy- • Hotspot temporal pattern detection method is used
sis and visual representation of crime analysis. Section to identify high, medium and low crime areas7. The
3 presents visualization techniques that can be used work provides information about what is the rea-

2 Vol 10 (40) | October 2017 | www.indjst.org Indian Journal of Science and Technology
 Samiullah Shah, Vijdan Khalique, Salahuddin Saddar and Naeem A. Mahoto

son behind the level of different crime rates in two visualization methods available. This research work uses
different locations. tables, line charts, pie charts, bar charts and area charts.
• Much research work has been done on crime Data represented in this format can be viewed statically,
analysis, which highlights the importance of since data is organized presenting it to end-user.
this area. Crime detection and criminal identi-
fication in India using data mining techniques is Information Visualization: Information visualization is
proposed10. The approach to detect criminals and the representation of processed form of data. Information
crimes has been addressed using different data visualization usually consists of the ways, where inter-
mining techniques. activity with the information, can be ensured. The
• Finding intensity level of crime from minimum interaction allows transforming the look & feel of the
to high scale and presenting that information on overall representation of the information. This research
geo-map in shape of clusters is reported8. The work uses data maps and clustering techniques for repre-
study uses five spatio-temporal pattern analysis sentation of information.
techniques.
• Aoristic signatures and the Spatio-Temporal Concept Visualization: The representation of qualitative
analysis of high volume crime patterns11 is used concepts, ideas, plans analyses is called concept visual-
to identify the patterns of crimes based on time- ization. This technique comprises of mind maps, layer
stamp in order to predict the times of crimes. charts, cause-effect chain and others.

Strategy Visualization: The systematic use of comple-

mentary visual representations to improve the analysis,
development, formulation, communication, and imple-
mentation of strategies in organizations is called Strategy
Visualization17. Strategy maps, failure tree and Ishikawa
diagram are some the frequently used strategy visualiza-
tion methods17,18.

Metaphor Visualization: The metaphor visualization

technique positions the information using graphical
components that metaphorically structures the informa-
tion. Graphic metaphors provide a visual means to assure
mutual understanding by making basic assumptions
Figure 3. Heat map for robbery. explicit17.

3. Visualization Techniques Compound Visualization: The usage of several graphi-

cal methods of information representation in one single
Visualization is the backbone of the crime analysis sys- schema is called the compound visualization. Examples
tem. The visual techniques offer insight and depth of compound visualization are cartoons, rich pictures,
knowledge for the decision-making strategies. Therefore, knowledge map and learning map.
the visual representation of facts and figure about crime is
the major focus of this research work. The visualization is Visualization Technique for Crime Analysis
considered an effective approach when it can improve or The cornerstone of the crime analysis system is its
increase the knowledge of the end user4,15,16. information visualization capabilities. The information
The different visualization techniques are described as presentation is a fundamental feature for decision sup-
follows. port and analysis. The use of both, data and information
visualization techniques make the better representation
Data Visualization: Data visualization is the representa- of facts. Thus, the information visualization plays essen-
tion of raw or unprocessed data. There are several data tial role in gaining in-depth knowledge about facts and

Vol 10 (40) | October 2017 | www.indjst.org Indian Journal of Science and Technology 3
 A Framework for Visual Representation of Crime Information

figures. The aim of this research is to provide a more read- application, which has been developed implementing the
able, comprehensible and customizable crime patterns. proposed framework.
Especially, line charts, bar charts, pie charts and area Furthermore, the longitude and latitude for geo-
charts have been considered to illustrate the information locations are unavailable in the structural database as
in this research. Besides, data maps with clustering are shown in Figure 1. Therefore, clustering crime patterns
applied for in-depth knowledge to better understand the over Google-Maps needs to be done using additional
crime patterns. processing to achieve the longitude and latitude of the
regions reporting crimes in the database. In particu-
lar, reported addresses of the crimes are fetched from
4. The Proposed Framework database and are processed in order to obtain their lon-
The architecture of the proposed framework is presented gitude and latitude using Google-Maps API (Application
in Figure 2. The major components of the framework Programming Interface). The clustering patterns com-
are 1) Data Center Module, 2) Controller Module and 3) ponent group together the similar crime types with their
Data Presentation Module. intensities and convert the processed data into JSON (i.e.
The details of each component are reported in the follow- JavaScript Object Notation) object for visualizing the
ing. crime patterns at geo-locations. Thus, three different for-
mats: i) statistically summarized information in graphs, ii)
1) Data Center Module heat-maps of the crimes and iii) clusters of crime patterns
This module is responsible for the creation of the data- located at certain regions are sent to Data Presentation
base. The module allows law enforcement officials to store Module.
the First Information Reports (FIRs) (i.e., crime reports).
The FIR contains information about the crime containing 3) Data Presentation Module
the location and area where the crime has taken place, Data presentation module is the front-end for end-user in
data and time of occurrence of crime, date and time of order to visualize the crime related information in inter-
crime report and the type of crime. Though the FIRs are active and effective manner. Statistically summarized
in the unstructured data format (Data format that does information is presented in the form of line chart, pie chart,
bar chart (see Figure 6-12). The heat-maps for the crimes
not have certain schema e.g., textual data), this module
at certain timestamp are reported in hotspots (see Figure
preprocesses the data and transforms into the structural
3 and Figure 4). Similarly, clusters at certain location of
data format. For instance, crime related data such as
crime patterns are visually presented (see Figure 5).
crime type, timestamp, date, longitudes and latitudes that
represent certain location of crimes are transformed into
System Security Mechanism
structural format. Finally, it stores the processed data into
The proposed framework ensures the security of the
relational database. The schema of the database is illus- data, since crime related data are always key concerns of
trated in Figure 1 . law enforcement agencies. The system security has been
ensured with implementing the state of the art technology
2) Controller Module of Intranet Security Mechanism. The system offers cus-
This module is the heart of the proposed framework, tom security layers and Intranet Security Mechanism is a
which performs the following tasks: a) Extracting struc- closed network.
tured data from database, b) Transforming structured Further, private Internet Protocols (IPs) of certain
data into statistically visual graphs, c) Detecting hotspots Class (Class A, Class B, and Class C) have been allowed to
(i.e., heat-maps) of crimes and d) Injecting clustering communicate with the Data Center Module. Thus, creat-
approach to identify the clusters of crime patterns. ing a private Hub of connectives. This mechanism secures
The detection of heat-maps is carried out based on the system from World Wide Web.
timestamp of the stored crime related data in the data-
base. The data is fetched from database and is processed The three-layer security is described as follows.
to produce heat-maps presenting the intensity of the Layer 1: In this layer, the system allows only authorized
crime within certain region. The region selection, time- private request and denies all requests for accessing the
stamp and crime types are the provisions of the prototype system from other networks.

4 Vol 10 (40) | October 2017 | www.indjst.org Indian Journal of Science and Technology
 Samiullah Shah, Vijdan Khalique, Salahuddin Saddar and Naeem A. Mahoto

Layer 2: This layer deploys firewall on the computer of crimes categorically. For the pattern analysis of crime,
machine where database is stored. Thus denying access a 2-dimension model is condensed to analyze patterns
of all IPs other than the IPs of authorized system’s class. of crimes by day-hour. The research contribution is dis-
Layer 3: An additional custom design firewall has been cussed in the following.
deployed on the data center machine, which compares all
local IPs, private IPs and physical addresses of all incom-
ing requests of users. In case any mismatch occurs, the
request is turned down and physical address of the user
is blacklisted. Thus this layer ensures extra-security mea-
sures to keep the data secure.

5. Research Assumptions
To acquire the authentic data about registered criminal
activities, law enforcement agencies were contacted. Due
to security and confidentiality of the data, officials refused
to share such data in any form (print or electronic).
However, they cooperated informally to build mechanism Figure 4. Heat map for snatching.
of synthetic data generation. The data has been manually
entered in the system based on the statistics informally 6.2 Live Heat Map
shared by law enforcement officials. Therefore, the reports Crime can take place anywhere at any time. Changing rate
presented in this research are based on hypothetical data of crime affects the crime analysis eventually resulting in
but illustrates the figures in exactly the same way it would wrong decision-making. Therefore, live heat maps show
represent when provided with the actual data about the exclusive and live details about the current situation
crime. Since the main objective of this paper is presenting of criminal activities. Figure 3 illustrates the heat map
an idea about how to represent crime data in the form of for robbery. Whenever any robbery takes place, provided
live statistics and graphical components. Thus, the pres- that the robbery has been registered timely.
ence of actual data is not the main requirement for this
paper. The dummy data serves well to show overall work-
ing and concept of this paper.

6. Discussion

6.1 Crime Analysis

The attempts made in crime analysis by individuals are Figure 5. Live crime location clustering.
limited to few methods and approaches. For instance,
study1 rendered there results in three different ways and The heat map shows as a colored spot according to fre-
studies2,3 have used spatio-temporal method to render the quency of the crime at certain time. Similarly, the colored
maps with hotspots on it which indicates the intensity of spot is visible on the heat map for snatching as indicated
crime in form of cluster. Line chart and cluster data of in Figure 4. The colored spots represent the crime being
crimes occurred in Sydney are reported9. registered as well as count of the crime. The higher num-
This research comprises most of the rendering meth- ber of crimes at certain time, the darker the color spot is
ods that are proposed by papers6-9 with much effective represented. Thus, the heat maps serves effectively to cater
graph formats and unit based clustering technique. In the crime rates and ensure security timely. Live heat maps
the cluster technique, each unit of cluster shows inten- for different registered rates also provide the performance
sity count of crimes on the map along with heat count measures of the security and law enforcement agencies.

Vol 10 (40) | October 2017 | www.indjst.org Indian Journal of Science and Technology 5
 A Framework for Visual Representation of Crime Information

6.3 Live Geolocations Clustering

Live crime patterns in terms of clusters at certain geo-loca-
tions can be viewed, which provides insight knowledge
of crimes and the criminals within certain locality. For
example, Figure 5 illustrates live geolocation clustering
proposed in this research. For instance, in Figure 5 there
are four indicators, which represent the locations where
certain crime occurred. In case, higher number of crime
happens, the clusters are represented with darker col-
ors to distinguish between higher crime rates and lower
crime rates.

Figure 6. Consolidated categorical yearly report of crime.

Figure 7. Bar chart illustrating consolidated categorical

yearly report of crime. Figure 9. Region wise comparative crime report.

Time based live heat maps may also help the adminis-
tration to make better decision and take necessary actions
based on identified times at certain regions; for example,
deployment of higher number of patrolling officers at cer-
tain regions at specific time.

Figure 10. City wise comparative crime report 2014-2015.

Thus, this information helps indicating types of

crimes, crime rates at certain locality. It may help to
determine the areas of the city where more crimes take
place. The decision about crime preventative and mitiga-
tion measures may be taken to improve the law and order
situation. The clustering of crime according to geoloca-
tion indicated on maps makes crime information more
readable and understandable. The visualization provides
a compact and integrated view of overall crime activities
Figure 8. Pie chart showing region wise crime summary. in a region.

6 Vol 10 (40) | October 2017 | www.indjst.org Indian Journal of Science and Technology
 Samiullah Shah, Vijdan Khalique, Salahuddin Saddar and Naeem A. Mahoto

6.4 Consolidation of Structured Data about data can be organized to increase the knowledge of
Crime decision makers. Thus, this will result in effective and
beneficial decision-making approaches.
In addition to live crime reporting and heat maps, the The proposed system provides the summary reports
proposed research presents the crime reports in single covering numerous dimensions, as mentioned. The pie chart
coherent interface. These consolidated reports provide in Figure 8 illustrates summary reports obtained in the pro-
the summary of all the criminal activities over the year posed framework. Likewise, Figure 9 to Figure 12 present
according to the number of their occurrences (frequen- the summary reports in bar chart format for region-wise
cies). The crime reports show the annual crime rate of comparative, city-wise comparisons, city-based annual, per
certain region as shown in Figure 6. Similarly, Figure 7 anum and monthly comparative reports respectively.
represents annual crime report in bar chart.

6.5 Annual and Regional Crime Summary

Reports
Aggregation of annual data provides a generalized view of
all crimes. Security officials require a number of reports
for all the criminal activities over the year. Consequently,
such summary reports help them to get insight knowl-
edge about crimes, crime rates and targeted regions. The
Figure 13. Monthly comparative crime summary report.
summary reports must be designed and should address
several dimensions to project facts and figures clearly and
effectively. 7. Conclusions
This digital-age experience criminal activities with diverse
criminal patterns and methods. There is a dire need of
adopting up-to-date technology by law enforcement agen-
cies to cope with the crime rates and their diverse patterns.
A framework has been proposed for crime analysis to
illustrate facts and figures about live heat maps of crimes,
crime patterns and their clusters. The representation of
crime data has been presented by applying data and infor-
mation visualization techniques. The goal of this research is
to provide an integrated solution to process real time crime
Figure 11. City wise annual crime summary report 2015. related data and provide the effective illustration of crimi-
nal information to reduce crime rates and ensure security.
The proposed framework comprising of a rich and
simplified environment may assist the law enforcing
agencies and policy makers in taking preventive measure
against crimes. In particular, live heat maps and clusters
representing crime patterns may help security officials in
taking pro-active measures in crime rate reduction. The
consolidated reports may further help officials to deploy
human resources more efficiently as per crime rate.
Figure 12. Annual crime summary report of 2015.

Summary reports such as area/region wise crimes, 8. References

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