Design and Implementation of an Online Crime Reporting System
Chapter One
Aims and Objectives of Study
To develop a web application that demonstrates that reporting, evaluating and investigating crimes in Nigeria should not be tortuous and that the model can be adopted for designing newer crime reporting platforms.
Our objective is to propose a system that caters for reporting all kinds of crimes, gives feedback and sustain the process of crime investigation and correction.
Chapter Two
Literature Review
Crime
Well and meaningful societies in the world frown at crime and any social vices that undermine the collective safety and values that have been adopted in that society. Crime persists as long as human society exist, therefore there is a continuous effort and legitimacy to report, investigate and provide convincing evidences to prosecute individuals who perpetrate any criminal activity.
The word Crime originated from the Latin word Crimen dubbed charge or offence. Shodghangha (2011) projected Crime as a function of the adoption of standards by the society rather than individualistic standards, that is, the society gradually determine what is perceived as good value and bad acts and proscribe possible consequences. Tappan (2001) defined Crime as an intentional act in violation of criminal law which is without an excuse. Sampson et.al (1993) also defined Crime any act or omission that is forbidden by law that can be punished by imprisonment and/or fine after due hearing in a law court. Elizabeth (2003) expressed a holistic definition of Crime as an act that is not just harmful to some individuals but also to the state or general public.
The determination of what is obnoxious or sane is determined through a long and continuous complex interactions and reactions among members of a society. As society varies so what is considered as crime varies from people to people. Wilson et.al (1985) argued that there cannot be a general theory to define Crime for all societies because of the diversity of human society and culture. More so, Gottfredson et.al (1990) and Sampson et.al (1993) had a different view, stating that differences in cultures and societies do not really matter but the common characteristics in cultures can be identified and a general theory can be formulated to prescribe what the society
should adopt as a crime, that is criminologist should not isolate crimes but to look for the commonality in crimes so as to propose a general rule to determining Crime for all societies. The dynamism of culture and unpredictability of human make it unlikely to have a general set of rules for all human societies.
No continent is left out; Ukoji et.al (2016) reported that Africa is considered a flash point for high crime. He noted that giants of Africa like Nigeria and South Africa now have high records of violent crimes in recent time. America also has high crime index while some places in Europe have been able to crime index by few digits.
Another important component of the justice system is the crime investigation and prosecution. The general knowledge of what Crime constitutes is not enough without ultimately punishing the offender to serve as deterrent and freeing the falsely accused persons in such occasions. The general justice system constitute the laws; which indicate what Crime is, the law apparatuses like security agencies, people and processes that are followed to implement justice. The people who are to be served by the justice system may soon begin to lose confidence and underreport or result to jungle justice to redress their anger if existing justice system continues to fail with time.
Criminal justice system also constitute the system of practices and institutions of Government directed at ensuring social control, deterring and mitigating crime or sanctioning individuals who violate laws with criminal penalties and rehabilitation efforts.
However the perception of criminal justice system in Nigeria is usually put in poor light because of rapid and failing structures of the justice system. Tosin (2016) reported that Amnesty international has always rated Nigeria justice system poorly and it is represented as a conduit for injustice from start to end. The actors in the justice system have also not helped the situation to start acting as expected by the lofty positions they hold and the important role they play in the process of dispensing justice. There is a sentiment about law makers having vested interest thereby making inadequate laws that do not really server the interest of the general public. The judicial system is also almost compromised as judges are bribed to pervert justice and dah the hope of the common man. Components of the justice system vary for different societies.
Chapter Three
System Analysis
Requirement Discovery
Requirements discovery is the most important activity in system software development activities.
It consists of the activities involved in requirement engineering such as meeting the business owners for proper elicitation, planning, scoping and holistic management.
Problem Analysis
The prominent crime reporting platforms in Nigeria are lopsided and not intuitive. The process of reporting crimes to security agencies still remain very difficult. The platforms are also unidirectional in the sense that they do not have feedbacks for the members of the public. The existing platforms do not support sharing of relevant information with other security agencies,
thereby because owners of these platforms wants to take all the praise; while in actual fact security is being reinforced when meaningful and relevant information is shared among security stakeholders towards offering an excellent service. All these make our justice system
questionable and irresponsible.
We are poised to investigate the possibility of having an all-encompassing platform that will practically address ego issues among security agencies, give feedbacks and strengthen the overall security service and existing security apparatuses.
Chapter Four
System Design
Application Architecture
Chapter Five
System Implementation and Evaluation
Implementation
The application is dubbed Ecrime Reporting. The classes in section 3.4.2 above were replicated using ASP.NET and C#. Each class is prefixed with class and then appended with the entity or object name. There are about seven (7) classes, five (5) tables and thirty-one (31) stored procedures used for the implementation. The classes form the logic layer for the application. The tables are the most important database objects used for storage of information. The stored procedures are carefully scripted queries intended to accomplish one of these actions Insertion, Update, Delete. As users interact with the application, certain stored procedures are triggered to effect some specific changes or return some dataset to the client.
The interfaces are styled using cascading style sheet (CSS). The role access is separated by creating different master pages with appropriate user privileges. A master page is a user view that can be assigned to different users based on their access rights. The master page also ensures that users have common and consist view across the application.
The class attributes are set and accessed through the Property methods defined in each class. Whenever an attribute is to be set or got, the instance of the class is initiated and used as a reference to set or get one or more properties.
The dropdown items across the application are created as setups. The specific category codes and setup names are generated and used for setting up any specific item. E.g. Gender, Security Agent, etc.
Chapter Six
Conclusion
Achievements
We identified the gaps in crime reporting information space in Nigeria; that there is no single allencompassing crime reporting platform in Nigeria. The few platforms are either specialized or informal. There is also not collaboration and sharing of information among security agents because of ego and desire for public praise. The existing platforms also do not allow for anonymity of reporter, summary of crime indexes based on context and feedback on the progress of investigation. All these problems make crime reporting harder and our justice system questionable.
Section 5.3 above demonstrated how the proposed application can be followed to address all the gaps identified with crime reporting in Nigeria. We demonstrated anonymity of users, getting feedback on incident submitted, summarization of crime indexes and accountability on the part of reporters and security agents. The performance of the software prototype assures us that our
approach to addressing current gaps in crime reporting ecosystem is viable and productive.
Limitation and Constraints
Users can register or an administrator can create some specific users. All users can manage their password. An administrator can manage users by disabling, enabling or out-rightly removing users. All users who register from the home page are referred to as Regular Users while those created by the Powerful administrator are Administrative users for different security agencies.
Users or visitor may choose not to register on the application; such users will be able to view high level crime indexes and submit an incident but they will not be able to track the submitted incident or view the granular details of the crime indexes across the application.
All users can drop an Incident report. Only registered users will be able to view, edit or delete a submitted report. If a user drops an incident report, the user can only edit or delete it if a progress note as not had been dropped by appropriate security agent. Registered users can also get feedback on the incident submitted. Users will be notified when the incident has been fully investigated and documented. An incident can either have two statuses: Open or Closed. An incident with Open status means the case is still being investigated and no conclusion has been reached. A Closed status means the investigators have reached a conclusion on the issue. The
progress note should carry the outcome of the investigation. An administrator cannot edit or delete a closed incident. An administrator can edit the progress note if the case is not yet closed. A closed incident cannot be deleted; it becomes historical for future reference.
Recommendations and Future Works
We look forward to a time when names and identity of the offenders will be maintained on the application and some artificial intelligence techniques will be harnessed to predict the possibility of offenders committing the crime again or map hot spot locations and the frequency of committing a particular crime. These features will further make the application better and strengthen our security and justice system in Nigeria. Adopting our approach should bring us at par with best democracies and societies that have proper justice systems in the world.
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