Complex networks are nowadays employed in several applications. Modeling urban street networks is one of them, and in particular to analyze criminal aspects of a city. Several research groups have focused on such application, but until now, there is a lack of a well-defined methodology for employing complex networks in a whole crime analysis process, i.e. from data preparation to a deep analysis of criminal communities. Furthermore, the “toolset” available for those works is not complete enough, also lacking techniques to maintain up-to-date, complete crime datasets and proper assessment measures. In this sense, we propose a threefold methodology for employing complex networks in the detection of highly criminal areas within a city. Our methodology comprises three tasks: (i) Mapping of Urban Crimes; (ii) Criminal Community Identification; and (iii) Crime Analysis. Moreover, it provides a proper set of assessment measures for analyzing intrinsic criminality of communities, especially when considering different crime types. We show our methodology by applying it to a real crime dataset from the city of San Francisco—CA, USA. The results confirm its effectiveness to identify and analyze high criminality areas within a city. Hence, our contributions provide a basis for further developments on complex networks applied to crime analysis.
Crime Analysis. White @cite_8 represent criminal activities via a georeferenced complex network, through which they compare criminal demographics and identify criminal communities. The demographic regions are created by clustering the urban areas using socioeconomic borders, whereas the crime network is formed by linking crime locations that are close according to the Euclidean distance. To identify the criminal communities, the authors employ a label propagation technique. Their results show that the crime network can be constructed without requiring information about individual crimes. However, their crime network does not take the urban topology into account, so their comparison is based only on socioeconomic information.
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It is undoubtedly cliche to say that we are in the Age of Big Data Analytics or Data Science; every computing and IT publication you find talks about Big Data and companies no longer are interested in software engineers and analysts but instead they are looking for Data Scientists! In spite of the excessive use of the term, the truth of the matter is that data has never been more available and the increase in computation power allows for more sophisticated tools to identify patterns in the data and on the networks that governs these systems (complex networks). Crime is not different, the open data phenomena has spread to thousand of cities in the world, which are making data about crime activity available for any citizen to look at. Furthermore, new criminology studies argue that criminals typically commit crimes in areas in which they are familiar, usually close to home. Using this information we propose a new model based on networks to build links between crimes in close physical proximity. We show that the structure of the criminal activity can be partially represented by this spatial network of sites. In this paper we describe this process and the analysis of the networks we have constructed to find patterns in the underlying structure of criminal activity. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether weak ties play an important role in explaining criminal activities. We first develop a model where individuals learn about crime opportunities by interacting with other peers. These interactions can take the form of either strong or weak ties. We find that increasing the percentage of weak ties induces more transitions from non-crime to crime and thus the crime rate in the economy increases. This is because, when the percentage of weak ties is high, delinquents and non-delinquents are in close contact with each other. We then test these predictions using the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (AddHealth), which contains unique detailed informations on friendship relationships among teenagers. The theoretical predictions of our model are confirmed by the empirical analysis since we find that weak ties, as measured by friends of friends, have a positive impact on criminal activities. Prior work on criminal incident prediction has relied primarily on the historical crime record and various geospatial and demographic information sources. Although promising, these models do not take into account the rich and rapidly expanding social media context that surrounds incidents of interest. This paper presents a preliminary investigation of Twitter-based criminal incident prediction. Our approach is based on the automatic semantic analysis and understanding of natural language Twitter posts, combined with dimensionality reduction via latent Dirichlet allocation and prediction via linear modeling. We tested our model on the task of predicting future hit-and-run crimes. Evaluation results indicate that the model comfortably outperforms a baseline model that predicts hit-and-run incidents uniformly across all days. Motivated by empirical observations of spatio-temporal clusters of crime across a wide variety of urban settings, we present a model to study the emergence, dynamics, and steady-state properties of crime hotspots. We focus on a two-dimensional lattice model for residential burglary, where each site is characterized by a dynamic attractiveness variable, and where each criminal is represented as a random walker. The dynamics of criminals and of the attractiveness field are coupled to each other via specific biasing and feedback mechanisms. Depending on parameter choices, we observe and describe several regimes of aggregation, including hotspots of high criminal activity. On the basis of the discrete system, we also derive a continuum model; the two are in good quantitative agreement for large system sizes. By means of a linear stability analysis we are able to determine the parameter values that will lead to the creation of stable hotspots. We discuss our model and results in the context of established crim...