CrimAnalyzer: Understanding Crime Patterns in S\~ao Paulo City

TL;DR

CrimAnalyzer is a visualization tool designed to help criminologists explore and understand crime patterns and hotspots in São Paulo, considering urban features and their influence on crime over time.

Contribution

The paper introduces CrimAnalyzer, a novel visualization-assisted analytic tool that addresses the need for flexible, detailed analysis of local crime patterns and hotspots over time.

Findings

Effective identification of local crime hotspots.

Ability to analyze crime pattern dynamics over time.

Qualitative and quantitative validation with real data.

Abstract

S\~ao Paulo is the largest city in South America, with high criminality rates. The number and type of crimes varies considerably around the city, assuming different patterns depending on urban and social characteristics. In this scenario, enabling tools to explore particular locations of the city is very important for domain experts to understand how urban features as to mobility, passersby behavior, and urban infrastructures can influence the quantity and type of crimes. In present work, we present CrimAnalyzer, a visualization assisted analytic tool that allows users to analyze crime behavior in specific regions of a city, providing new methodologies to identify local crime hotspots and their corresponding patterns over time. CrimAnalyzer has been developed from the demand of experts in criminology and it deals with three major challenges: i) flexibility to explore local regions and understand their crime patterns, ii) Identification of not only prevalent hotspots in terms of number of crimes but also hotspots where crimes are frequent but not in large amount, and iii) understand the dynamic of crime patterns over time. The effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed system are demonstrated by qualitative/quantitative comparisons as well as case studies involving real data and run by domain experts.