A study of prominant crimes in Kwara state Nigeria

Abstract

Nigeria has been experiencing high rate of criminal activities where crimes are being carried out with more perfect and sophistication for over ten years now. The recent amongst are the insurgent called Boko Haram who believed that western civilization of education for all is unlawful and the Avengers also called Militants in the Niger Delta part of Nigeria who believed the Government is cheating their people in that region. The data for this study contained records of different crime committed in Kwara states between 2004 and 2014. This research work is to: identify the prominent crime types; determine the association that existed between pairs of crime types; reduce the dimension of the data using statistical tools; and classify the crime types in different colonies. Principal Component, Biplot, correlation analysis and other statistical tools were utilized in this paper. The pair wise correlation test of significance table indicated that, out of the 45 pair wise correlations, only 6 are significant at 5% and these include; homicide-suicide, homicide-robbery, suicide-robbery, rape-theft, assault-broken, broken-theft and broken-unlawful. We observed that crime types such as assault, unlawful, broken and theft can be grouped together as the most frequent crimes committed; the prevailing cases occurred in the year 2006 and 2008. We also observed that, suicide, homicide and robbery formed the next group, which are more frequent in the year 2009, 2010 and 2011. Kidnapping and arson are not frequently committed but they are more prominent in the year 2012 and 2013. Rape formed the lowest standalone crime type committed and also less frequent with no year of prevailing occurrence.

Keywords: Principal Component; Biplot; Correlation coefficient; Crimes; Kidnapping; Robbery; Suicide; Homicide; Unlawful; Theft.