A Holistic Framework for Crime Prevention, Response, and Analysis With Emphasis on Women Safety Using Technology and Societal Participation

Abstract

Ensuring women's safety in smart cities is a need of the hour. Even though several legal and technological steps are adopted worldwide, women's safety continues to be an international concern. Criminal records are maintained by law enforcement agencies and are most often not available to the public in an easily comprehensible form. While some wearable devices and mobile applications are available which are touted to aid in ensuring women's safety, they utilize limited societal intervention and are not very efficient in ensuring the safety of the women as and when required. Most often the crime response, crime analysis, and crime prevention schemes are not integrated, leading to gaps in ensuring women's safety. Our major contribution is in developing a holistic system encompassing the three crucial aspects, i.e crime analysis and mapping, crime prevention, and emergency response by leveraging societal participation for women safety management. This work applies the Geographic Information System (GIS) for the identification of hotspots and patterns of crime. The proposed system uses data generated from the mobile application and/or wearable gadget prototyped as a part of this work along with the criminal history records for crime response, analysis, and prevention. The system for the hotspot identification is demonstrated for the Pilani town in the Jhunjhunu district in the state of Rajasthan, India, and can be easily scaled up geographically and utilized as a safety strategy for smart cities. While the common man is provided a cost-effective solution via the developed mobile application or wearable gadget, the various components are integrated into a website for supervisory management and can be utilized by law enforcement agencies.