The dark web is termed as the concealed content hidden behind interfaces offering secure chats or mailing applications on the WWW, and exploiting it for illegal practices is termed cybercrimes. As the dark web is enormously big compared to the surface web, cyber-crimes have become one of the biggest challenges to tackle. Predicting them before they actually happen is almost impossible. The work thus deals with predicting the number of cognizable crimes (physical and cybercrimes reported collectively) by National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB), the government-approved agency for maintaining crime records in India. Predicting crimes has become important as they advance to new levels of intelligence and diversification with the increased use of information and communication technology (ICT). This work presents the research based on evidences with ARIMA and LSTM time series models for predicting the cognizable crimes in India. The authors have used root mean squared error and mean absolute error as loss functions for error evaluation, and the results obtained from both the models are presented.
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Crime is an act done by a person which is against the laws of the country. The offenders of law commit crime in any form at any location irrespective of the time of the day. Crime Rate in India has reached alarming figures and the figures does not dimmish even after adopting stringent measures and continuous efforts put in by the Government. It is one of the most challenging social problems in the country as it hampers the socio-economic development of the nation and its citizens.
While most of the world including India was struggling with the Corona spectre in the year 2020, many sensational crimes also dominated the headlines. They managed to grab attention along with tea time discussions and social media. The news of arrest of the Kanpur gangster Vikas Dubey who ambushed eight policemen with heavy gunfire from rooftops in his village was the biggest crime story that shocked the people of India. The audacity of the crime prompted a look into how he rose through the ranks of UP mafia. The police records shows that the history-shooter Vikas Dubey entered the crime world with snatching and robberies but later on involved himself in murder cases.
Another news that raised alarm in the society was the murder of a 21-year-old woman, identified as Nikita Tomar was shot dead outside her college in Haryana's Faridabad district by a man who first tried to abduct her. When she resisted, one of the accused pulled out a revolver and fired at her. The number of urban murders reported are really disturbing and thus the challenge lies in busting crimes and ensure conviction for murderers.
In 2016, it was the Nirbhaya gangrape case (Nirbhaya, 2016), in 2018 it was the Kathua case (Kathua gangrape-murder case, 2019), in 2019 the rape and murder of a Hyderabad vet and in 2020 it was the Hathras gangrape and murder case. These rape and murder cases shake the country to its core, provoke public anger and force us to reason for the uptick in murders in India.
Likewise, Dark Web Crime cannot be overlooked as India ranks second amongst the countries most affected by cyber attacks during 2016-2018 and fourth out of the top 10 targeted countries in the world (Nazah et al., 2020). Some of the biggest cyberattacks worth mentioning include the 2018-Cosmos Bank Cyber Attack in Pune, 2018-UIDAI Aadhaar data breach and 2019 Hacker attack on Indian HealthCare Websites (Cyber Threat Report, 2019). Factually, Deep Web is another layer of the WWW which cannot be easily accessed online (Bergman, M. 2001,Gupta & Bhatia, 2017) and can be characterized by the Unknown—unknown depth, breadth, users and content. The Dark Web is a furthest corner of this Deep Web having content that has been intentionally concealed and the crime on the Dark Web deals with exploiting this content for illegal practice (Finklea, K. 2017).
Every year large volume of crime and prison related data is generated by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in association with Government of India (GoI) but analysing this data for future decision making remains a major challenge for them. Steep rise has been witnessed in the crime rate in India during the past decade. As per the reports by NCRB, the largest increase of approximately 63% was seen in cognizable crimes (Personal & Archive, 2009). Thus, controlling crime rate has become the topmost priority of the law enforcement agencies and government police department in recent years (Hendricks et al., 2000). But for effective decision making and policy generation, gaining insights into the factors responsible for the crime, is crucial.