CrimeStat: A Spatial Statistical Program for the Analysis of Crime Incidents

Abstract

CrimeStat is a spatial statistics and visualization program that interfaces with desktop GIS packages. It is a stand-alone Windows program for the analysis of crime incident locations and can interface with most desktop GIS programs. Its aim is to provide statistical tools to help law enforcement agencies and criminal justice researchers in their crime mapping efforts. The program has many statistical tools, including centrographic, distance analysis, hot spot analysis, space-time analysis, interpolation, Journey-to-Crime estimation, and crime travel demand modeling routines. The program writes calculated objects to GIS files that can be imported into a GIS program, including shape, MIF/MID, BNA, and ASCII. The National Institute of Justice is the distributor of CrimeStat and makes it available for free to analysts, researchers, educators, and students (The program is available at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/crimestat). The program is distributed along with a manual that describes each of the statistics and gives examples of their use (Levine 2007a).