Geographical analysis of drug crimes in Kerman city

Security is one of human societal needs and the most important index of space quality. In our modern complex urban societies, different environmental factors result various disharmonies and crimes in an interactive influence process. On the other hand, occurrence of diverse societal abnormalities especially drug crimes is currently one of the important problems of our country and judicial authorities concerns. Thus, this research has tried to take a new step towards environmental prevention by focusing on the identification and geographic analysis of drug crimes in Kerman city. It has tried to specify the major hotspots of drug crimes in Kerman city using primary statistical methods and kernel density estimation by illustrating the importance of crime hotspots study. It is obvious that the results of this study can help environmental prevention activities and police performances against drug abuse and trafficking in Kerman and also we can prevent forming of these regions by understanding spatial, temporal and societal factors forming crime hotspots. The results indicate that drug-dealing crime center is approximately coincident with central part of the city with an inclination to both east and west. The congestion of residential usage in these parts of the city and lack of urban facilities such as cultural, sports, green lands and recreation and healthy leisure activities that provide prevention of entering teenagers and young adults into delinquency groups is one of the effective environmental reasons for the high drug-dealing crime.