GIS and Crime, Part II, 18 March 2015
Visualization is a very important aspect to criminology. Police can use daily crime maps to compare the locations of various types of crime. In general, maps are useful for understanding hierarchical perspectives and obtaining an overview of how things change. It is important to always consider MAUP (modifiable areal unit problem), however, because this will affect how readers understand the issues. Scale is always an vital feature of mapping. Two other factors to keep in mind when mapping are the use of kernel densities and adjustments for population. Kernel densities show relative impacts, rather than raw numbers. Relative changes from low to high are more informative than actual values. Normalizing data by the underlying population reduces biases in the resulting maps. Additionally, there are a number of available software packages and datasets that make crime mapping easier with GIS.