A volunteered geographic information system for monitoring and managing urban crimes: a case study of Tehran, Iran.

Crime occurrence is an ever-increasing social problem of Tehran city. Crime management for this city requires social action, public participation or community-oriented policing. In this regard, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) systems can be of great support to community policing efforts. By employing such systems, members of the society can act as active, intelligent, responsible, location-aware, mobile, and distributed sensors in order to monitor and report local crimes and generate crime data. Analysis of such data can be substantially helpful in crime management within Tehran. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop a VGI-based system as a means for crime management in District # 22 of Tehran. Using this system, citizens and police departments can accurately report and analyze various information such as precise location, type, photo, date and time. Citizens' feedbacks indicate that the system is easy-to-use (highly 55%, very highly 31%), suitable for reporting and presenting crime data (highly 90%) and reducing crime rates (highly 40%, very highly 35%), all the while providing an attractive user interface (highly 25%, moderately 45%). However, most citizens stated that the system is highly dependent in its need for prior knowledge (highly 75%). On the other hand, evaluation results by police departments show that the system facilitates the entire crime management process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]