On the Use of Data Mining Techniques for Crime Profiling

Crime is today a salient fact, an integral part of the risks we face in everyday life. The concern about national andinternational security has increased significantly since the incident of September 11th, 2001 attacks. However, informationoverload thwarts the effective and efficient analysis of criminal activities. Application of data mining in the context of lawenforcement and intelligence analysis holds the promise of solving such problems. The benefit of data mining for policeseems tremendous, yet only a few limited applications are documented. Data mining can be used to model crime detectionproblems. Any research that can help in solving crimes faster will pay for itself. This paper gives reviews current trends inprofiling crime using data mining techniques. We proposed the use of clustering algorithm as a data mining approach to helpdetect the crimes patterns and speed up the process of solving crime.Key words: Crime, profiling, data mining, criminals, attacks and detectio