Modelling policing strategies for departments with limited resources

Authored by Alejandro Camacho, Hye Rin Lindsay Lee, Laura M Smith

Date Published: 2016

DOI: 10.1017/s0956792515000571

Sponsors: United States National Science Foundation (NSF)

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Pseudocode Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

Crime prevention is a major goal of law-enforcement agencies. Often, these agencies have limited resources and officers available for patrolling and responding to calls. However, patrolling and police visibility can influence individuals to not perform criminal acts. Therefore, it is necessary for the police to optimize their patrolling strategies to deter the most crime. Previous studies have created agent-based models to simulate criminal and police agents interacting in a city, indicating a ``cops on the dots{''} strategy as a viable method to mitigate large amounts of crime. Unfortunately, police departments cannot allocate all of the patrolling officers to seek out these hotspots, particularly since they are not immediately known. In large cities, it is often necessary to keep a few officers in different areas of the city, frequently divided up into beats. Officers need to respond to calls, possibly not of a criminal nature. Therefore, we modify models for policing to account for these factors. Through testing the policing strategies for various hotspot types and number of police agents, we found that the methods that performed the best varied greatly according to these factors.

Tags

Crime Hot-spots Criminal behavior Residential burglary Victimization