I concur with Marcelo. Maptitude can do some of the functions in a crime analyst's toolkit (i.e. convex hulls, minimum spanning circles, and basic density grids). But CrimeStat does much more, and it is both FREE and well-documented. But as Marcelo notes, you'll still need a GIS (Maptitude, ArcGIS, MapInfo...) to display the CrimeStat output.
I've used the CrimeStat/Maptitude pairing few times myself, though usually to look at things other than crime. Still, I can report that Maptitude opens CrimeStat-generated shapefiles without a hitch. For example, this map shows the spread of the foreclosure crisis (foreclosure notice filings) in Atlanta http://www2.urban.org/nnip/subprime/animated.gif -- the maps were created in Maptitude, the graphs were created in Stata, and the whole thing was sewn up into an animated gif using imagemagick. --- In [email protected], "Marcelo Luna" <tc...@...> wrote: > > Mike, > > I think that, for crime analysis, CrimeStats (freeware) is the proper tool > to use ( <http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/CrimeStat/> > http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/CrimeStat/). But it doesn't have a graphical > interface, so you could use Maptitude as a geographical database and > visualization tool. CrimeStats manual is very detailed and a great source to > learn spatial analysis or spatial statistics. > > > > I use a old copy of TransCad (Maptitude's big brother for transportation > analysis) and many Crimestats tools would be useful if implemented in > Maptitude/TransCAD. Recently, I used it to do a basic traffic accident > analysis finding the accidents hotspots using the nearest neighbor > clustering technique and kernel density functions. I used Crimestat to > process the data stored in TransCAD and then TransCAD was used to present > the results of CrimeStats with thematic maps. > > > > Best regards, > > Marcelo Luna. > ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Maptitude/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Maptitude/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
