Crime Mapping Writing Assignment: Benefits and Challenges

Crime Mapping: Benefits and Challenges
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Crime Mapping: Benefits and Challenges
Crime mapping is a technique used by the law enforcement agency to identify crime-related hotspots, map crime incidents, and analyze the spatial correlation between such hotspots and targets. The technique not only focuses on the victims and their respective perpetrators, but also the location in which crimes occur. In addition to the crime scenes, crime mapping also takes into consideration the locations where both the targets and the offenders live, play, and work (Daglar & Argun, 2016). With such considerations, crime mapping has revealed a positive correlation between crime scenes and the perpetrators’ comfort zones. A number of factors influence the distribution of crimes is a given landscape, including the offenders’ geographic convenience and luring of potential victims of their perpetrators. This essay examines the use of crime mapping-related data in addressing or preventing crimes as well as the potential benefits and challenges relating to crime mapping.
The law enforcement officers can utilize data obtained from crime mapping to combat crime in the area. For instance, they can use data relating to the location of the crime to effectively allocate community and patrol resources. In addition, they can also use data relating to the distance to obtain insight into the spatial correlation between the victims and the offenders. Specifically, such insight will help the police officers to provide an effective response to the actual or potential crimes. Furthermore, the data about the direction of the crime can also be helpful to the police officers in profiling the movement of criminals. Patterns are also critical in crime analysis. The police officer can use crime pattern as an important investigative tool since it reveals the underlying process behind such patterns (Harries, 1999). Patterns are classified into four key categories: dispersed, clustered, uniform, and random.
Crime mapping is beneficial to the society in various aspects. This technology prov...