A web based crime reporting and management system. Case study Kampala Metropolitan

Abstract

In Uganda and around the whole world today, there is a rampant increase in security and crime related issues majorly in urban centres and much of these crimes are unreported to the responsible authorities. Due to that fact, the study presents the development of a crime reporting and management system to enhance operational measures that have been deployed to curb crime in communities. The idea draws its motivation from the inconsistencies of going to police stations and personal beliefs of weak investigative capabilities of the police and the slow system at the police stations for managing the crimes at hand. The major aim of this study is to investigate the challenges faced while reporting crimes and develop a system that would support real-time reporting of the crimes and managing the crimes that have been reported to the authorities. Primary data was gathered from members of the police, particularly from Wandegeya police station and the general public within Wandegeya and Makerere University whereby an online tool was designed to collect the data and administered it to them independently. The system has an administrator whose major responsibility is to register users, police officers and police stations to the system and manage all accounts, the assign different crimes to different stations and police officers. The police are responsible to manage all complaints and writing or making a report of the finished cases. The user adds a new complaint, checks its status and provides suggestions or feedback. The system was developed using a visual basic programming language with the use of Microsoft Access for databases The viability of the phone and computers based reporting was justified by the presence of more than half of the sampled population owing and being able to use smartphones which would support the application. The study that was conducted also concluded that the current crime reporting and management system at the police stations are [part of the problems that negate the policing sector hence encouraging criminal acts. Finally, the study recommends that if this application will be used, then massive training on the usage and awareness to the public be done as it represents a viable tool for solving crime.