Analysis of Spatial Patterns for Urban Crimes in the Informal Settlement Area of Islamabad in Zanjan

Islamabad is a large informal habitat in Zanjan and it is dealing with several problems from different aspects of structure, land use, service-provision systems, and demographic, social and cultural issues. The purpose of this study is to analyze the urban crimes committed in Islamabad both from structural and spatial aspects and also to explain the facilitators for the occurrence of offences in this area. This study applies a descriptive-analytic method. To identify the spatial distribution pattern of crimes in Islamabad, graphic-based statistical models have been used including Mean Center Test and Standard Deviation Ellipse; and to identify the urban crime hot spots, the Nearest Neighbor Index (NNI) and Quatric Kernel Density Estimation Interpolation Technique were used. The findings of this study reveal that the spatial distribution of the crimes under investigation in this area follows a centralized and clustered pattern. The committed crimes in this area mostly include violence and villainy, drug abuse and drug trafficking. There is also a direct relation between the population density in this area and crime rate, so that the relative population density in this area is 6 times more than the mean population density in other areas of Zanjan and the crime rate is also higher than other areas of the city to the same proportion. On the other hand, the high rate of residential land use and the lack of some other land uses needed by the citizens, have influenced the geographic distribution, type and rate of crimes as well as spatial patterns of crimes in this area.