  S\~ao Paulo is the largest city in South America, with high criminality
rates. The number and type of crimes varies considerably around the city,
assuming different patterns depending on urban and social characteristics. In
this scenario, enabling tools to explore particular locations of the city is
very important for domain experts to understand how urban features as to
mobility, passersby behavior, and urban infrastructures can influence the
quantity and type of crimes. In present work, we present CrimAnalyzer, a
visualization assisted analytic tool that allows users to analyze crime
behavior in specific regions of a city, providing new methodologies to identify
local crime hotspots and their corresponding patterns over time. CrimAnalyzer
has been developed from the demand of experts in criminology and it deals with
three major challenges: i) flexibility to explore local regions and understand
their crime patterns, ii) Identification of not only prevalent hotspots in
terms of number of crimes but also hotspots where crimes are frequent but not
in large amount, and iii) understand the dynamic of crime patterns over time.
The effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed system are demonstrated by
qualitative/quantitative comparisons as well as case studies involving real
data and run by domain experts.
