GIS Analysis of Crime Incidence and Spatial Variation in Thiruvananthapuram City

The rate of crime incidents is increasing in developing countries mainly due to the unequal distribution of wealth and societal status. The present study attempts to identify and explore the rate and spatial variation of crime in Thiruvananthapuram city for a period from 2010 to 2014. The improved computer based technologies like GIS and availability of Geographic data make it possible for law and enforcement agencies to create analytical maps and various analysis to identify the crime hotspot area .The hotspot analysis in Geographic Information System is helpful for the identification of crime hotspot through spatial auto correlation, spatial analysis and interpolation. The Moran's I test statistic of spatial auto correlation has been done prior to GetisOrd Gi* hotspot analysis to find out the clustering pattern as well as the outliers in the data. The crime hotspot analysis uses vectors to identify the locations of statistically significant crime hotspots and cold spots and IDW interpolation method is used for better visualization. These methods are applied on the crime data of Thiruvananthapuram city of Kerala state to find the hotspots for crime incidents like Murder, Robbery, Snatching and Theft.