Witnessing Crime through Tweets: A Crime Investigation Tool based on Social Media

Panote Siriaraya, Yihong Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang, Yukiko Kawai, Mohit Mittal, Péter Jeszenszky, Adam Jatowt

Abstract: The vast and growing amount of publicly available real-time information from social network services such as Twitter could provide many benefits for improving public health and safety, especially towards the area of crime prevention. While prior studies have leveraged such data to help in the prediction of criminal incidents, we have developed a crime investigation tool which utilizes Twitter data to aid in crime analysis. The tool provides contextual information about crime incidents by visualizing the spatial and time-based characteristics of a crime and its context using data from nearby tweets and from the criminal history of a target place. In addition, sentiment analysis is also carried out with the identified tweets to further examine the negative characteristics of the spatial areas related to the different crimes in question. A demonstration prototype of this tool was developed as a web application for the area of San Francisco.