Crime Hotspot Tracking and Geospatial Analysis in Merseyside, UK

Crime prediction is a topic of significant research across the fields of criminology, data mining, city planning, law enforcement, and political science. Crime patterns exist on a spatial level; these patterns can be grouped geographically by physical location, and analyzed contextually based on the region in which crime occurs. This paper proposes a mechanism to parameterize street-level crime, localize crime hotspots, identify correlations between spatiotemporal crime patterns and social trends, and analyze the resulting data for the purposes of knowledge discovery and anomaly detection. The subject of this study is the county of Merseyside in the United Kingdom, over a span of 21 months beginning in December 2010 (monthly) through August 2012. Several types of crime are analyzed in this dataset, including Burglary and Antisocial Behavior. Through this analysis, several interesting findings are drawn about crime in Merseyside, including: hotspots with steadily increasing crime levels, hotspots with unstable crime levels, synchronous changes in crime trends throughout Merseyside as a whole, individual months in which certain hotspots behaved anomalously, and a strong correlation between crime hotspot locations and borough / postal code locations. We believe that this type of statistical and correlative analysis of crime patterns will help law enforcement agencies predict criminal activity, allocate resources, and promote community awareness to reduce overall crime rates.