Development of a Real-Time Crime Management System in Southwestern Nigeria: The Mobile Application

Abstract

Effective crime reporting in the Southwestern Nigeria has been stymied through demoralization of security personnel, institutional corruption and dearth of state-of-the-art equipment. Even in the face of digitization of the economy and increasing use of micro-blogging platforms and messaging apps, the security situation in the region has only worsened. In order to mitigate the growing crime rate, several platforms in the form of mobile applications and websites, have been proposed while some have already been introduced to the general public. However, the major weakness of the existing solutions is that the underlying crime management systems are not adoptable by every possible security outfit available. Hence, the existing systems are not scalable and auditable. To this end, this study aimed to design and develop a system for effective real-time crime reporting and management for southwestern Nigeria. The system consists of user-centered mobile application and administrative web application. This paper presents the development of the mobile application part. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was adopted for designing the mobile application by following the steps in Waterfall software development technique. The client side of the mobile application was developed using Google Flutter Software Development Kit (SDK) in Android Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE), while the server side of the application was built using Node.js JavaScript framework and SQL Database. The developed software system was evaluated using alpha and beta testing by module testing and getting feedback from real users based on certain predefined criteria, including User Interface, Functionality, Clarity and Maintainability. With a percentage functionality of 91% and maintainability of 94%, the developed mobile application performed satisfactorily and effectively serves its purpose.