Abstract
AbstractCrime is a complex phenomenon, emerging from the interactions of offenders, victims, and their environment, and in particular from the presence or absence of capable guardians. Researchers have historically struggled to understand how police officers create guardianship. This presents a challenge because, in order to understand how to advise the police, researchers must have an understanding of how the current system works. The work presents an agent‐based model that simulates the movement of police vehicles, using a record of real calls for service and real levels of police staffing in spatially explicit environments to emulate the demands on the police force. The GPS traces of the simulated officers are compared with real officer movement GPS data in order to assess the quality of the generated movement patterns. The model represents an improvement on existing standards of police simulation, and points the way toward more nuanced understandings of how police officers influence the criminological environment.
Highlights
The term guardianship is a criminological concept that refers to the way guardians, such as property owners and the police, prevent potential offenders from committing crimes (Cohen and Felson 1979)
While Robert Peel identified the prevention of crime and disorder as the first goal of policing (Home Office 2012), police forces are asked to help with finding missing persons, providing security at public festivals, and handling traffic accidents (Metropolitan Police 2014b)
In an effort to correct this oversight, the model presented here uses empirical geographic information system (GIS) data combined with real police incident data in order to simulate a complex, interactive system of police officer movement and behavior, which improves upon the existing uninformed models of movement
Summary
The term guardianship is a criminological concept that refers to the way guardians, such as property owners and the police, prevent potential offenders from committing crimes (Cohen and Felson 1979). The exploration of human behavior as it is informed by a variety of data sources is an emerging field of research (Watts 2013), and represents a promising new tool for exploring complex and important processes It has been successful in incorporating criminological concepts such as routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson 1979), rational choice theory (Cornish and Clarke 1987), and crime pattern theory (Brantingham and Brantingham 1984) into simulations (e.g. Groff 2006; Birks et al 2012; Malleson et al 2010). ABM allows researchers to explore counterfactual situations, comparing the projected effectiveness of different interventions or actions (Wise 2014) These counterfactual explorations based in behavior are inaccessible to other methodologies, and make our model more powerful and applicable to the needs of the Met. The remainder of this article is structured as follows: Section 2 will present a brief overview of the policing context and behaviors we seek to emulate in our simulation.
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