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The rise in crime rates over the past few years is a major issue and is a huge source of worry for police departments and law enforcement organizations. Crime severely harms the lives of victims and the communities they live in many places throughout the world. It is an issue of public disturbance, and large cities often see criminal activity. Many studies, media, and websites include statistics on crime and it is contributing elements, such as population, unemployment, and poverty rate. This paper compares and visualizes the crime data for four different cities in the USA, namely Chicago, Baltimore, Dallas, and Denton. We assess areas that are significantly affected based on zip codes and variations in crime categories. As the crime rates have significantly changed both upward and downward throughout time, these changes are compared to their external causes such as population, unemployment, and poverty. The results show crime frequency and distribution across four different cities and supply valuable information about the complex relationship between social factors and criminal behavior. These results and outcomes will help the police department and law enforcement organizations better understand crime issues, map crime incidents onto a geographical map, and supply insight into factors affecting crime that will help them deploy resources and help in their decision-making process. 

During emergencies like fire and smoke or active shooter events, there is a need to address the vulnerability and assess plans for evacuation. With the recent improvements in technology for smartphones, there is an opportunity for geo-visual environments that offer experiential learning by providing spatial analysis and visual communication of emergency-related information to the user. This paper presents the development and evaluation of the mobile augmented reality application (MARA) designed specifically for acquiring spatial analysis, situational awareness, and visual communication. The MARA incorporates existing permanent features such as room numbers and signages in the building as markers to display the floor plan of the building and show navigational directions to the exit. Through visualization of integrated geographic information systems and real-time data analysis, MARA provides the current location of the person, the number of exits, and user-specific personalized evacuation routes. The paper also describes a limited user study that was conducted to assess the usability and effectiveness of the MARA application using the widely recognized System Usability Scale (SUS) framework. The results show the effectiveness of our situational awareness-based MARA in multilevel buildings for evacuations, educational, and navigational purposes. 

There are a wide variety of mobile phone emergency response applications exist for both indoor and outdoor environments. However, outdoor applications mostly provide accident and navigation information to users, and indoor applications are limited to the unavailability of GPS positioning and WiFi access problems. This paper describes the proposed mobile augmented reality system (MARS) that allows both outdoor and indoor users to retrieve and manage information for emergency response and navigation that is spatially registered with the real world. The proposed MARS utilizes feature extraction for location sensing in indoor environments as during emergencies GPS and WiFi systems might not work. This paper describes the implementation of this MARS deployed on tablets and smartphones for building evacuation purposes. The MARS delivers critical evacuation information to smartphone users in the indoor environment and navigation information in the outdoor environments. A limited user study was conducted to test the effectiveness of the proposed MARS using the mobile phone usability questionnaire (MPUQ) framework. The results show that AR features were well integrated into the MARS and it will help identify the nearest exit in the building during the emergency evacuation.