Discovering Crime Trends and Patterns Using Three-Dimensional Visual Analytics

Crime analysts and law enforcement agencies can formulate effective strategies utilizing current crime trends and patterns. Modern computational technologies, particularly big data analysis and visualization can be applied to available crime data and other resources. Visual analytics, an analytical reasoning technique with interactive visual interfaces, is a powerful tool that serves to augment the trend and pattern recognition capabilities of experts. This paper introduces a three-dimensional (3D) visual analytics framework that interactively visualizes crime data and other relevant datasets on a highly accurate 3D model of the City of Vancouver, Canada. This 3D visualization advances crime analysis activities through a more accurate display of the area under study. The 3D visual analytics can improve identification of temporal and spatial criminal areas and provide strategic and effective plans for pro-active police deployment. The open data catalogue from the City of Vancouver, Canada and the Vancouver Police Department open source property crime data were used in this study.