CAN HOT SPOTS POLICING REDUCE CRIME IN URBAN AREAS? AN AGENT-BASED SIMULATION
Authored by David Weisburd, Anthony A Braga, Elizabeth R Groff, Alese Wooditch
Date Published: 2017
DOI: 10.1111/1745-9125.12131
Sponsors:
No sponsors listed
Platforms:
NetLogo
Model Documentation:
ODD
Flow charts
Mathematical description
Model Code URLs:
Model code not found
Abstract
Over the past two decades, there has been a growing consensus among
researchers that hot spots policing is an effective strategy to prevent
crime. Although strong evidence exists that hot spots policing will
reduce crime at hot spots without immediate spatial displacement, we
know little about its possible jurisdictional or large-area impacts. We
cannot isolate such effects in previous experiments because they
(appropriately) compare treatment and control hot spots within large
urban communities, thus, confounding estimates of area-wide impacts. An
agent-based model is used to estimate area-wide impacts of hot spots
policing on street robbery. We test two implementations of hot spots
policing (representing different levels of resource allocation) in a
simulated borough of a city, and we compare them with two control
conditions, one model with constant random patrol and another with no
police officers. Our models estimate the short-and long-term impacts on
large-area robbery levels of these different schemes of policing
resources. These experiments reveal statistically significant effects
for hot spots policing beyond both a random patrol model and a landscape
without police. These simulations suggest that wider application of hot
spots policing can have significant impacts on overall levels of crime
in urban areas.
Tags
routine activity theory
diffusion
patterns
criminology
stability
Prevention
Agent-based
modeling
Crime hot spots
Police innovation
Crime prevention
Hot spots policing
Micro places
Patrol time
Disorder
Robbery