The modern world is everything but a safe place. This sad but indisputable fact has been proven to be true by several research. Crime rate is souring in this part of the continent and there exists many determinant to this anti-societal behavior amongst the people. In this paper, those variables that are crime prone in Southeastern Nigeria over a 10 year study period were determined using Principal Component Analysis (PCA); a Multivariate Statistical Technique that is use to reduce the dimensionality of a large number of interrelated crime variables while retaining as much of the information as possible. Data were collected on seven crime variables, from the data bank of National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). Moderate correlations exists between sizeable number of crimes, two principal components was extracted using the scree plot, explaining 86.4% of the total variation in the dataset. The highest and most committed crime in the study region are Armed Robbery, Murder and Grievous Harm and Wounding.
Keywords: Eigenvalues, Principal Component Analysis, crime rate, scree plot, southeastern nigeria
