This project is a cumulation of countless hours in the SIS lab and the strong commitment to sticking to a subject that I was passionate about. Being an aspiring police officer, I really wanted to do some sort of crime analysis. And the fact that I presevered, and did the best with the data available, to me is a success in itself. I do believe that is certainly room for improvement and in the next few paragraphs, I will attempt to address them.
As mentioned in the beginning, I was limited to a certain type of data, and this automatically determined the extent of analysis. If I was able to have access to data that had times and types of crimes attached to it, I would have been able to achieve a much more complex analysis. With the data available, I was able to manipulate information and provide areas in which the Vancouver Police Department would have been able to wisely allocate patrol teams. I'm not sure how else I would have gone about getting more detailed crime information. I scoured the internet to no avail, and my contacts at the SFU CPAL lab and ultimately Vancouver Police Department also gave me negative responses. The three variables chosen had specific geographical attributes about them, parks, skytrain and rail routes. Perhaps I could have limited my selection to simply just transportation routes, but there was insufficient data for that route. I also thought of doing an analysis on locations of concentrated human activity, but again, with my time constraint, I was unable to find sufficient data.
With the data obtained, I believe that I analysis that followed was effective and clear. Originally, after I had performed the MCE operation, the screen only had a couple of raster pixels on the screen, and I was really frustrated because that was not much information at all. I scrapped the work for a few days, and came back again later to the same situation. I was playing around with the raster output and decided to see what would happen if I reversed the raster image back into the type of file that it originally was. Vector! Lo and behold, much more points came up and and I was able to conclude my spatial question with a significant spatial answer.
The main criticism that can be made of the analysis is that it is quite narrow, in its objectives. As mentioned before, if the situation was that there were specific instances of crimes happening in parks, and that the known transportation medium by the criminals was by rail or skytrain. This would be appropriate for that analysis. Other than that, the main limitation of this analysis had to do with the limitations of the data that I had access to. I was originally hoping to come up with a conclusion that would help the general public avoid deviant behaviour. Like the worst places to be at a certain time, or the safest neighbourhoods to be in, etc, etc.
As it turns out, this analysis,
with its holes and problems, still is a decent presentation of the use
of G.I.S. in criminal investigations. Much more is definitely possible
with increased access to classified information.