Mexican citizens rate delinquency and violent crime as the most pressing problem in their country. To promote collective solidarity and repress individual defense mechanisms, Mexico need new strategies for local crime prevention. Geographical information systems can be used both, to analyze the main problems and to evaluate the success of selected prevention. The historical perspective of crime mapping is considered first. The methods explicate procedures with different scales depending on the data source and its cartographic representation, including tools for spatial analysis. The various methods are compared by an accuracy index. The Gi* method in Cancun lead to the best results. The crime survey supplements the information from the reported crime. However, no correlations between crime hotspots and the socio-economic indicators from the census data can be confirmed for the study area. |