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A crime is an unlawful act by an individual that is contrary to the laws of a region or a country. Crime is a significant issue, notably since the 1960s, that negatively affects the social fabric and economy of countries, and attributable to greed, poverty, and economic distress (Saleh & Khan, 2019). Crimes, such as assault, homicide, theft, battery, and those involving narcotics have grown rapidly in Chicago, USA; for example, reported robberies in 2016-2017 exceeded 16,000 cases (Saleh & Khan, 2019). Battery is a criminal charge for the illegal use of violence toward the body of another citizen resulting in violent interaction or physical harm (Castillo, 2015). According to the New Zealand Police (2020), even for small countries like New Zealand, the ratio of crimes committed in 2019 was 10% greater than that of 2018.
Crimes affect people’s quality of life and the economic growth of a country. People often consider crime rates within the city as a primary factor for moving so that they can avoid areas where crime rates are high (Chalom et al., 2002). Furthermore, the Global Peace Index organised by the Institute of Economics and Peace (IEP, 2019) utilizes crime rates as an indicator when globally ranking countries. Security is a major concern worldwide (Malathi, & Babo, 2011).
The need for more police patrols burdens governments financially. High crime rates negatively affect the distribution of public funds to public services, such as emergency, education, fire, and healthcare (Ahishakiye et al., 2017).
Crime analysis is the process of differentiating and evaluating patterns related to crime past crime data. According to Ahishakiye et al. (2017), the patterns discovered when conducting crime analysis help managers allocate resources effectively and also support the police to apprehend criminals. Data analysis techniques, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and visualization, play a vital role in the process of crime analysis providing exceptional search capabilities to derive valuable results (Sharma et al., 2021; Bunker, & Thabtah, 2017).
Applying AI techniques to crime data is possible due to high incidences of crime. AI methods, such as machine learning, explore crime datasets to find concealed correlations that can be utilized by analysts to take appropriate actions related to arrests and resource management (Abbass et al., 2020). For example, Shah et al., (2021) investigated machine learning and computer vision approaches to improve crime detection rate. In addition, a recent research work by Abbas et al., (2020) revealed that predictive machine learning models can be used for predicting crimes occurring on social media such as Cyber Scam, Cyber stalking and Cyber Hacking among others.