NCJ Number
214165
Date Published
2006
Length
10 pages
Annotation
This study used hypothetical data of crime hotspots for the Kingdom of Bahrain to compare two methods of Geographic Information System (GIS) and Hierarchical Clustering techniques.
Abstract
The use of two types of hierarchical clustering analyses pinpointed areas of high crime concentration and high crime risk, enabling the effective deployment of officers to high crime areas and providing the data needed to launch effective prevention programming. In addition to identifying overall crime hotspots in a region, the technique can also be used to generate hot spots for specific crime categories such as burglary and homicide, or can be used to generate other factors such as time of crime, date of crime, and offender information. Research methodology involved the incorporation of crime incident data from the Kingdom of Bahrain into GIS using geocoding techniques. Geocoded data were then used for hierarchical cluster analysis in CrimeStat II in order to identify various crime hot spots throughout the Kingdom. Two types of hierarchical cluster methods were performed: Nearest Neighbor Hierarchical spatial clustering (Nnh) and Risk Adjusted Nearest Neighbor Hierarchical spatial clustering (Rnnh). Data from the entire Kingdom of Bahrain were utilized for the study, but hypothetical data were reported in the paper to protect the sensitive nature of the actual unpublished crime data. Figures, references