Int. J. Knowledge Engineering and Data Mining, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2017 145 Copyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Detecting crime patterns from Swahili newspapers using text mining George Matto* and Joseph Mwangoka School of Computational and Communication Science and Engineering, The Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 447, Arusha, Tanzania Email: mattog@nm-aist.ac.tz Email: josephwam@gmail.com *Corresponding author Abstract: The Tanzania Police Force, as many other law enforcement agencies in developing countries, relies mostly on manual, personal judgments, and other inadequate tools for analysis of data in its crime databases. This approach is inadequate and prone to errors. Moreover, research shows that more than half of all crimes committed in Tanzania are not reported to police and thus it is likely that they are not analysed by the police. In this study, we use text mining to extract crime patterns from sources of crime data outside police databases. In fact, we use four daily published Swahili newspapers. With the help of our developed patterns mining model we extracted several crimes reported in the newspapers, we mapped the distribution of the mined crimes country-wide, and with the use of FP-growth, we generated association rules between the mined crimes. Results from this study will contribute to crime detection and prevention strategies. Keywords: crime; crime patterns; text mining; association rules; FP-growth. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Matto, G. and Mwangoka, J. (2017) ‘Detecting crime patterns from Swahili newspapers using text mining’, Int. J. Knowledge Engineering and Data Mining, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp.145–156. Biographical notes: George Matto is a PhD scholar at the School of Computational and Communication Sciences and Engineering at the Nelson Mandela Institution of Science and Technology. He holds MSc in Computer Science and BSc (Hons) in Computer Science. His areas of research include database management systems, data mining, text mining, pattern recognition and big data. Joseph Mwangoka is a Senior Lecturer at the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, Arusha, Tanzania. He received his PhD degree from the Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2009. Until 2012 he was a Senior Research Engineer at the Institute of Telecommunications, Aveiro, Portugal. His research interests include data science, cognitive radio technology, dynamic spectrum management, ICT4D/E, health informatics, and cloud computing. He has co-authored a number of peer-reviewed book chapters, journal articles and conference proceedings.