Hot spot policing involves the deployment of police patrols to places where high levels of crime have previously concentrated. The creation of patrol routes in these hot spots is mainly a manual process that involves using the results from an analysis of spatial patterns of crime to identify the areas and draw the routes that police officers are required to patrol. In this article we introduce a computational approach for automating the creation of hot spot policing patrol routes. The computational techniques we introduce created patrol routes that covered areas of higher levels of crime than an equivalent manual approach for creating hot spot policing patrol routes, and were more efficient in how they covered crime hot spots. Although the evidence on hot spot policing interventions shows they are effective in decreasing crime, the findings from the current research suggest that the impact of these interventions can potentially be greater when using the computational approaches that we introduce for creating hot spot policing patrol routes.

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Hot spot policing is a form of targeted police patrol deployment for decreasing crime. For hot spot policing to be effective, it requires analysis of crime data to identify the specific locations where crime is concentrated and create suitable patrol routes. The creation of hot spot policing patrol routes is a manual task that police officers perform, requiring skills and knowledge about hot spot policing and crime pattern analysis. This can limit the use of hot spot policing where these skills and knowledge are not available, and where they are available, the creation of patrol routes can be a time-consuming task. In this paper, we introduce two computational route generation heuristics that automate creating hot spot policing patrol routes. Both approaches identify the specific locations where crime concentrates and then use different methods to create the patrol routes. We compare the performance of each approach using metrics associated with effective patrol route creation and through visual inspection. We conclude that the heuristics we introduce provide an accurate means for creating hot spot policing patrol routes, which can support greater and improved use of hot spot policing as an effective type of intervention for decreasing crime.

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