Science NOW – The Mathematics of Clumpy Crime: “Even in a sprawling city like Los Angeles, crime still clumps together. Mathematical models of burglars presented…at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceNOW) show that these so-called crime hot spots form when previous crimes attract more criminals to a neighborhood. By understanding how these blobs form, researchers hope to help police departments break them up.”
“Funded by the Human Social Dynamics Program at NSF, the UC Mathematical and Simulation Modeling of Crime Project centers on theoretical, methodological and empirical work to develop analytical and computational models of crime pattern formation. Crime mapping forms a key feature of current approaches to understanding offender behavior and is a tool used increasingly by police departments and policy makers for strategic crime prevention. However, despite the availability of sophisticated digital mapping and analysis tools there is a substantial gap in our understanding of how low-level behaviors of offenders lead to aggregate crime patterns such as crime hot spots. Thus, for example, we are unable to specify exactly why directed police action at crime hot spots sometimes leads to displacement of crime in space but, surprisingly, often can also lead to hot spot dissipation and a real reduction in crime incidences. Agent-based modeling offers a potential avenue for developing a quantitative understanding of crime hot spot formation built from the bottom-up around offender behavior. Agent-based models are not only more consistent with the scale of decisions that offenders actually take, but they also open the door to the development of custom statistics that are designed to answer specific behavioral questions less tractable in general statistical models.”
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