Site Selection of Police Centers in Accordance with Passive Defense Using GIS Software (Case Study: The City of Kazeroon)

Having a safe and appropriate place to live is considered among the most primitive and essential needs of every human. The expansion of the Earth population followed by increased urban life has turned city districts and neighborhoods into a place of social, cultural and ethnic conflicts and has contributed to setting the stage prone to the emergence of urban abnormalities such as crime, delinquency and theft. The passive defense, as one of the effective ways of defense against any kinds of threat including natural and human, has always been noticed by the countries of the world. In this regard, the threat management caused by environmental hazards has always been a major objective of planners. According to the principles of passive defense, in the process of hazards management, the defense element has various levels which include before, while and after the hazards that are the most cost effective and peaceful way of defense related to the pre-occurrence of hazards. The issue of site selection is one of the main principles of passive defense and considered as a pre-crisis measure. The proper site location of police centers, not only provides better police services to citizens but also is very impressive in the subject of passive defense. This requires the identification of high crime areas and deployment of agents at proper locations. Therefore; the high crime areas of the City of Kazeroon are first identified and then using the Geographic Information System (GIS), the best locations to deploy police stations are determined. In this paper, six criteria for the site location of police stations in accordance with passive defense are used which include access to main streets, the distance between the existing police stations, proximity to high crime areas of the city, distance from training centers, slope and the kind of land utilization. And finally, the lands of Kazeroon are categorized, according to optimality, into ten groups ranging from weak to very good in order to deploy police centers and five new locations to establish new police centers in the City of Kazeroon are proposed, as well.