Grey Analytic Hierarchy Process Applied to Effectiveness Evaluation for Crime Prevention System

With the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization, crime prevention issues become serious in China each day. Many cities have established a number of crime prevention systems in order to maintain social stability. However, crime prevention system is a complex system, which is controlled by a number of interrelated factors and is difficult to estimate. To overcome the obstacles of conventional effectiveness evaluation for crime prevention system, this paper proposed an effectiveness evaluation method for crime prevention system which combined the advantages of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and a grey clustering method to guarantee the accuracy and objectivity of weight coefficients. After constructing an index system of crime prevention system effectiveness evaluation based on correlated factors, we calculated the weight of every index with AHP and gave an evaluation result by means of a grey clustering method. A case study was given to validate the design of the underlying grey analytic hierarchy process model. Results show the feasibility and reliability of the model, which will be helpful to realize the quantitative analysis in crime prevention system effectiveness evaluation and provide a decision support tool for decision makers.