CrimAnalyzer: Understanding Crime Patterns in São Paulo.

Abstract

São 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.