Mining the relationship between car theft and places of social interest in Santiago Chile

Abstract

Recent work suggests that certain places can be more attractive for car theft based how many people regularly visit them, as well as other factors. In this sense, we must also consider the city or district itself where vehicles are stolen. All cities have different cultural and socioeconomic characteristics that influence car theft patterns. In particular, the distribution of public services and places attract a large crowd could play a key role in the occurrence of car theft. Santiago, a city that displays drastic socioeconomic differences among its districts, presents increasingly-high car theft rates. This represents a serious issue for the city, as for any other major city, which -at least for Santiago- has not been analyzed in depth using quantitative approaches. In this work, we present a preliminary study of how places that create social interest, such as restaurants, bars, schools, and shopping malls, increase car theft frequency in Santiago. We also study if some types of places are more attractive than others for this type of crime. To evaluate this, we propose to analyze car theft points (CTP) from insurance companies and their relationship with places of social interest (PSI) extracted from Google Maps, using a proximity based approach. Our findings show a high correlation between CTP and PSI for all of the social interest categories that we studied in the different districts of the Santiago. In particular our work contributes to the understanding of the social factors that are associated to car thefts.