Development of an Online Crime Management System (OCMS)

Case study of the Nigerian Police Force

• OYEKUNLE OYEBOLA COMFORT

Abstract

The aim of this project and implementation is to develop interactive online crime management system which is easily accessible to the public taking a cognizance of the Nigeria Police Force crime management approach.

The accessibility of the public is to complain or even report a crime to the police stations is relatively low going by the fear of the harassment by the police department as well as endemic corruption in the system. The project and implementation titled “online crime management system” taking cognizance of the Nigeria Police Force is a web basedapplication which manages and control the information transportation with respect to a particular location.

The approach will provide avenue for escalating crimes, making complaints, account disappeared persons, show fugitive details, show missing individuals and possessions, report theft, manage reported crimes among other things.

The project procedures precisely looks into the crime recognition and avoidance.

The user interfaces have been planned using the DOT Net technologies. The standards of security and data protective mechanism have been given a big choice for proper usage. The application takes care of different modules and their associated reports, which are produced as per the applicable strategies and standards that are put forwarded by the administrative staff.

1. Introduction

With the rapid growth in telecommunication industry that gives room for multiple access, there is need for implementation of digitized crime management system for more efficiency. Real time crime management is directly proportional to the class of security optimization which reduces the crime as well as social vices in the society

With increasing population, it is very paramount to initiate an efficient crime control/management technique to maximize the security throughput as well as effective information technology utilization in providing necessary security cover for the general public. Online crime management system is employed to maximize effective security implementation.

Serious crime grew to nearly epidemic proportions, mainly in Lagos and other urbanized areas categorized by speedy development and change, by stark economic inequality and deprivation, by social disorganization, and by inadequate government service and law enforcement capabilities. The situation sees the urban area more policed with around 25 percent of the population lived.

The public distrust of the law enforcement agencies happened to be the major reason for underreporting of crimes.

Annual crime rates fluctuated around 200 per 100,000 population in Nigeria until the early l960s and then steadily increased to more than 300 per 100,000 by the mid-1970s. Accessible data from the 1980s specified a continuing increase. Overall conveyed crimes rose from nearly 211,000 in 1981 to between 330,000 and 355,000 during 1984-85. Although serious crime usually constituted the larger category, minor crimes and offenses accounted for most of the increase. Crimes against property generally accounted for more than half the offenses, with thefts, burglary, and breaking and entering covering 80 to 90 percent in most years. Assaults established 70 to 75 percent of all crimes against persons. The British High Commission in Lagos cited more than 3,000 cases of falsifications yearly.

In the late 1980s, the crime wave was aggravated by deteriorating economic circumstances and by the ineptitude, incompetence, and dishonesty of police, military, and customs personnel who conspired and collaborated with offenders or actually involved in criminal manner. Most of the crimes committed usually occur due to delay in conveying incidence report to the relevant information owner.

The design of a system based on web application provides fast link to the records maintained and must interpret the significant reviews about the security condition in other to reduce the crime. It is predictable to centralize the organization of information in Crime for the main objectives of fast and efficient sharing of critical information across all Police Stations in the country. Initially, the system will be implemented across Cities and Towns and later on, be interlinked so that a Police detective can access information across all records in the state thus helping speedy and successful completion to cases. The System would also be used to generate information for pro-active and preventive measures for fighting crime.

The project has been planned to be having the view of distributed design, with centralized storage of the database. The application for the storage of the data has been planned with the usage of the constructs of SQL server.

The objective of the project and implementation was to develop a site in which any citizen can report crimes. The Crime Management and Reporting System make the crime reporting easier providing effective documentation as well managing the crime history. This project and implementation will be useful for the Nigeria Police Department and other law enforcement agencies and parastatals. The home page provides the login capability for both the registered users and administrators. Only the Administrators in-charge of different Police Stations will be able to login to their home pages. The citizen could only report crimes and missing person. The public response to official misconduct was to take matters into its own hands persons and property while enjoying the facilities being provided to the unregistered citizen. Generally, most police departments in the developed nations have recorded substantial progress in using ICT in management and service delivery whereas their counter parts in the less developed nations have not. This has enabled the police stations in developed countries to provide improved service delivery to its citizens as well as improved interaction with its citizens. The resulting benefits have been increased transparency, cost reduction among other benefits. However, ICT has not yet been fully utilized by the police departments in developing nations including our country thus resulting to poor service delivery to the public.

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Crime is part of human activities and needs to be managed. No human society has ever been totally free of deviants and it is unlikely that society will ever be. The more populated and complex a society becomes the wider the range of antisocial conducts that must be controlled by the government through the armed forces and other agencies the Police Force. The incident-based system reports on a much broader range of crimes and includes data on the circumstances of the crime, the victim, and the defendant. The current crime reporting system is faced with several difficulties as there is no instant means of reporting crime other than telephone calls, messaging or perhaps face-to-face which is usually cumbersome especially where the reporter wishes to keep anonymity. The proposed crime reporting system aims to assist the Nigerian Police in their bid to solve crimes with timely and useful information about criminals and/or their mode of operations so as to nip in the bud criminal activities in a given locality. Finally, a prototype crime reporting system was designed that relies on four reporting forms: a complaint or dispatch reporting form, a crime event report form, follow-up investigation report form, and an arrest report form. The system consists of three functional modules: a data capture module, a report management and control module, and a data utilization module. Future work on crime reporting system can be tailored towards accessibility (mobile version), awareness and improvement on the usage.

The rate at which information is transmitted from one end to another through a given system has significantly increased. The success of an organization depends largely on the rate at which information is exchanged within the organization and also on how safe the information/data transmission process is. The attitude of workers to work also affects the success and growth of any organization.

0Different components in this project and operation included visitor’s module, registered user’s module, and administrator module. The visitor’s module will inundate the visitor to view latest broadcast (latest news update) that have been provided by the administrator.

The news is filtered with respect to the visitors’ location. The registered user module provides theclientwith the facility for reporting crimes, missing persons, view most wanted persons, making complaints etc. The administrator’s module provides facility for full administration of the website by responding to clientrequests, it also allows for adding new admin, managing most wanted persons and missing persons, managing hot news and crimes and several other functionality.

PROBLEM JUSTIFICATION With the high increase in population in the country with several regions being properly planned for good access road and other social amenities, the economy has negatively been influenced. This has seen its citizens indulging in lots of businesses in order to earn a living. This makes them so much busy to a point that they don’t get time to do some of their responsibilities such as reporting crime. Figure 1.1 Lagos city showing unplanned roads with minimal social amenity

In most cases the officials result to harassing the citizens reporting the crimes and if there is a way to report crimes without having to go to police stations then this problem could be avoided. At other times when one reports about a missing person or property, this gets only to the police station where you have reported but don’t get to other police stations all over the County or to a larger extent and this narrows down the area of investigation. In spite of the development of Information Technology, little study has been done to analyze the problems affectingthe performanceof the Police.

Figure 1.2Reports of Police inefficiency and harassment

Crime is part of human activities and needs to be managed. No human society has ever been totally free of deviants and it is unlikely that society will ever be. The more populated and complex a society becomes the wider the range of anti-social conduct that must be controlled by government using police power. The incident-based system reports on a much broader range of crimes and includes data on the circumstances of the crime, the victim, and the defendant. The current crime reporting system is faced with several difficulties as there is no instant means of reporting crime rather than telephone calls, messaging or perhaps face-to-face which is always cumbersome in a case the reporter might want to keep anonymity. To strengthen crime reporting system, an online system is enhanced to fully take the responsibility of reporting crime in a manner that will be useful to the Nigerian Police Force (NPF). For instance, in cases involving property crime the incident-based system will report on the:

• type and description of the article;
• its value;
• type of loss (e.g., stolen, vandalized);
• type of victim (e.g., individual, business);
• And location of crime (e.g., convenience store, residence).

Criminologist and ICT Engineers are always at loggerhead over the technological advancement in Crime management which it is widely believe to be wasteful with little or no emphasis on the efficiency.

They both believe the present system of crime management is faulty and needs redefinition. While Criminologist argue on security signal basis, the engineers define crime management on what is obtainable.

1. Research Objectives and Significance

The sudden growth in the telecommunication provider providing wireless access has made the internet more accessible. With more demand for intelligent crime management system

The aim of CRIS is to assist the Nigerian Police Force (NPF) in their bid to solve crimes with timely and useful information about criminals and/or their mode of operations so as to nip in the bud criminal activities in a given locality. The objectives of the research work are as stated below:

1. To provide a deterministic crime reporting model
2. To create a distributed data warehouse for crime reporting based on the model.

The enhanced data quality of the incident-based reporting system will be of significant benefit to state and local governing bodies, criminal justice agencies, and the public. Data from the incident-based system will enhance both strategic and tactical decision making in criminal justice. Because incident-based data will provide a more accurate picture of a community’s crime patterns, decisions regarding law enforcement, judicial, and correctional resources can be made based on empirical data. Similarly, the level of detail provided by incident-based data can assist law enforcement agencies and the community to identify crime problems in their community such as:

• crime hotspots ^• populations who are at risk and
• Drug and alcohol problems.

Crime prevention strategies may then be developed and evaluated based on empirical evidence.

This study will also assist policy analyst to understand both factors that impedes the efficiency and effectiveness of the police and the ways by which the situation could be improved upon so as to bring crime and disorders in the society to its barest minimum. Finally, this study will go a long way in contributing to the knowledge of police work. Besides, other researchers and students in higher institutions especially those in sociology department can derive various secondary data from this study.

2. Crime Sensing

The root causes of crime [are] poverty, unemployment, underemployment, racism, poor health care, bad housing, weak schools, mental illness, alcoholism, single-parent families, teenage pregnancy, and a society of selfishness and greed.

Online Crime Management system is a web based application that provides avenue as well as gateway for reporting online crimes, lodge complaints, announce missing persons, inform the general public the fugitive details mailing with platform to chart online and send emails.

There is no restriction on the number of concurrent connections to the web server. Every user must subscribe to the web server by registering on the server.

1. Existing System

In the existing system only we can see the details of particular information about the police stations in our state, the existing system has more workload for the authorized person, but in the case of Proposed System, the user can registered in our site and send the crime report and complaint about a particular city or person.

2. Drawbacks of Existing System

• More man power.
• Time consuming.
• Consumes large volume of pare work.
• Needs manual calculations.
• No direct role for the higher officials.
• Damage of machines due to lack of attention.

To avoid all these limitations and make the working more accurately the system needs to be computerized.

3. Proposed System

The aim of proposed system is to develop a system of improved facilities. The proposed system can overcome all the limitations of the existing system. The system provides proper security and reduces the manual work. The existing system has several disadvantages and many more difficulties to work well. The proposed system tries to eliminate or reduce these difficulties up to some extent. The proposed system will help the user to reduce the workload and mental conflict. The proposed system helps the user to work user friendly and he can easily do his jobs without time lagging.

4. Expected Advantages of Proposed System

The system is very simple in design and to implement. The system requires very low system resources and the system will work in almost all configurations. It has got following features

• Ensure data accuracy’s.
• Proper control of the higher officials.
• Reduce the damages of the machines.
• Minimize manual data entry.
• Minimum time needed for the various processing.
• Greater efficiency.
• Better service.
• User friendliness and interactive.
• Minimum time required.