Spatial Pattern and Hotspot Analysis of Violent and Property Crimes in Edo State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study focused on the spatial pattern and crime hotspot analysis in Edo State, Nigeria. The spatial data structure includes; boundary data that include crime incident locations comprising community centroids, sourced from the divisional police headquarter in the state, boundary data capturing the Local Government Area boundaries, coordinate band projected coordinate systems. The analytical techniques used include the Kernel Density Estimation (KDE), the Global Moran’s I for spatial autocorrelation and Local Moran’s I (LISA-Local Indication of Spatial Association). The results show that crimes that area clustered are armed robbery, murder and cultism. Kidnapping is strongly clustered while cyber-crime is weakly clustered. The classification of crime hot spots by community shows that only 24 communities (22.2%) are classified as High-High hotspots, communities classified as Low-Low cold spots were 38 accounting for 12.4% of the total crime, High-Low outlier were 8 communities and Low-High outlier were 12 communities. The hot spots that shall be emerging in the study area can be classified into: intensifying hotspots having 8 communities, persistent hot spots involving 10 communities, new hot spots that may include 12 communities, four (4) communities would be involved in diminishing hot spots and sporadic and oscillating hot spots will include 8 and 6 communities.