A Scalable Online Crime Reporting System

Crime is part of human activities and needs to be managed. No human society has ever been totally free of deviants and it is unlikely that society will ever be. The more populated and complex a society becomes the wider the range of antisocial conducts that must be controlled by the government through the armed forces and other agencies especially the Police Force. The incident-based system reports on a much broader range of crimes and includes data on the circumstances of the crime, the victim, and the defendant. The current crime reporting system is faced with several difficulties as there is no instant means of reporting crime other than telephone calls, messaging or perhaps face-to-face which is usually cumbersome especially where the reporter wishes to keep anonymity. The proposed crime reporting system aims to assist the Nigerian Police in their bid to solve crimes with timely and useful information about criminals and/or their mode of operations so as to nip in the bud criminal activities in a given locality. Finally, a prototype crime reporting system was designed that relies on four reporting forms: a complaint or dispatch reporting form, a crime event report form, follow-up investigation report form, and an arrest report form. The system consists of three functional modules: a data capture module, a report management and control module, and a data utilization module. Future work on crime reporting system can be tailored towards accessibility (mobile version), awareness and improvement on the usage.