Open Source Crime Prediction for the National Institute of Justice

• NCJ Number: 251180
• Date Published: October 2017
• Author(s): Gregory Ledray
• Length: 3 pages
• Grant Number(s): 2016-NIJ-Challenge-0003
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Report (Technical); Report (Technical Assistance); Program/Project Description

Annotation

The author - one of the winners in the National Institute of Justice's (NIJ's) Real- Time Crime Forecasting Challenge - describes how he used open-source software to predict crime in Portland, Oregon over a 3-month period

Abstract

The geospatial open software used is OpenJump. This is an open-source alternative to Esri's ArcGIS. OpenJump was used to take an existing shapefile that contained geographic information on Portland, Oregon and generate a new shapefile with squares of a desired size. After creating the shapefiles with OpenJump, a way to parse those shapefiles without using Esri's software was needed. This was achieved with a C library called Shapelib. A C program was then written to map the point data provided from Portland to the geographic squares, The data were outputted to a csv file where the line in the file was related to the square number. The web source for Shapelib documentation is provided. Almost all of the implementation documentation from the work is provided in this paper.