Class
Article
College
Jon M. Huntsman School of Business
Department
English Department
Faculty Mentor
Yong Seog Kim
Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Abstract
According to the 2021 World Drug Report released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), over 36 million people among 275 million people who used drugs worldwide suffered from drug use disorders in 2020 alone. In addition, the number of people who use drugs is estimated to increase by 11 percent globally by 2030. Therefore, there exists a strong need to further understand drug usage and drug-related crimes to address prevention and intervention policies. In particular, the identification of geographical locations with frequent drug-related crimes is very critical for law enforcement agencies and state/federal governments to establish strategies to curve such criminal activities. At the same time, it is also important for the public, in general, to be aware of and avoid such dangerous areas for safety reasons. To this end, we collect, analyze, and visualize crime data sets collected through incident-based reporting (IBR) by local police and sheriff’s offices from 2011 through 2019 to explore geospatial and temporal characteristics of the drug and alcohol-related crimes in several local communities in Utah. We find a natural grouping of the geographic locations via a density-based clustering algorithm (DBSCAN), which finds 10 clusters in addition to outliers automatically. As we expected, many cities in Utah are distinguished by various levels of incidents of drug and alcohol-related crimes over years. However, we find across all cities that both the overall crime incidents and the number of drug-related incidents increase significantly during the winter season (October through April). Most of all, we find several geospatial locations of such crimes close to public parks, residential areas, or school districts, which may inform proactive policing in these communities.
Location
Logan, UT
Start Date
4-6-2022 12:00 AM
Included in
Geospatial Analysis of Drug-Related Crimes in Local Communities in Utah
Logan, UT
According to the 2021 World Drug Report released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), over 36 million people among 275 million people who used drugs worldwide suffered from drug use disorders in 2020 alone. In addition, the number of people who use drugs is estimated to increase by 11 percent globally by 2030. Therefore, there exists a strong need to further understand drug usage and drug-related crimes to address prevention and intervention policies. In particular, the identification of geographical locations with frequent drug-related crimes is very critical for law enforcement agencies and state/federal governments to establish strategies to curve such criminal activities. At the same time, it is also important for the public, in general, to be aware of and avoid such dangerous areas for safety reasons. To this end, we collect, analyze, and visualize crime data sets collected through incident-based reporting (IBR) by local police and sheriff’s offices from 2011 through 2019 to explore geospatial and temporal characteristics of the drug and alcohol-related crimes in several local communities in Utah. We find a natural grouping of the geographic locations via a density-based clustering algorithm (DBSCAN), which finds 10 clusters in addition to outliers automatically. As we expected, many cities in Utah are distinguished by various levels of incidents of drug and alcohol-related crimes over years. However, we find across all cities that both the overall crime incidents and the number of drug-related incidents increase significantly during the winter season (October through April). Most of all, we find several geospatial locations of such crimes close to public parks, residential areas, or school districts, which may inform proactive policing in these communities.