Visualization of Criminal Activity in an Urban Population

Abstract

Crime is a multidimensional, complex, and dynamic activity. In order to understand its nature one has to comprehend not only its spatio-temporal dimensions, but also the nature of crime, the victim-offender relationship, role of guardians and history of similar previous incidents. This is a formidable task due to the limitations of present visualization methods. Both for the police department and criminal justice researcher the need to visualize a vast amount of data is a prerequisite to the task of dealing with the crime phenomenon. This chapter presents an interactive visualization intended to present the viewer with an accurate and intuitive view of the criminal activity in a cityscape. The technique employs many different visualization elements, which taken together presents a useful methodology that can be used to visualize many of the associated factors of crime. The chapter also presents the software technique and discusses points for future investigation.