CrimeStat III
CrimeStat is a spatial statistics program for the analysis of crime incident locations, developed by Ned Levine & Associates under grant 2002-IJ-CX-0007 from the National Institute of Justice. The program is Windows-based and interfaces with most desktop GIS programs. The program provides supplemental statistical tools to aid law enforcement agencies and criminal justice researchers in their crime mapping efforts. CrimeStat is being used by many police departments around the country as well as by criminal justice and other researchers. The new version is 3.0 (CrimeStat III) and is available free of charge.
The program inputs incident locations (e.g., robbery locations) in 'dbf', 'shp', ASCII or ODBC-compliant formats using either spherical or projected coordinates. It calculates various spatial statistics and writes graphical objects to ArcView®, MapInfo®, Atlas*GISTM, Surfer® for Windows, and ArcView Spatial Analyst©.
The statistics cover spatial description and distance analysis (for describing the general spatial pattern of crimes), hot spot analysis (for identifying concentrations of crashes), interpolation (for visualizing crime concentrations over a large area), space-time analysis (for understanding temporal and spatial interaction in offender behavior), and journey-to-crime estimation (for estimating the likely residence location of a serial offender). New in version 3.0 is a module for crime travel demand modeling, widely used in transportation planning. It allows a crime analyst to model crime trips over a metropolitan area and to make reasonable guesses at the travel mode and likely routes taken. It can also be used to model possible interventions.
CrimeStat III is accompanied by sample data sets and a manual that gives the background behind the statistics and examples. The manual was fully re-written and also discusses applications of CrimeStat developed by other analysts and researchers. The crime travel demand module is fully documented with six new chapters and a chapter with case studies on Chicago and Las Vegas by Richard Block and Dan Helms.
The software is available for free download, along with full documentation, from NACJD (National Archive of Criminal Justice Data) at ICPSR.