Improving the Creation of Hot Spot Policing Patrol Routes: Comparing Cognitive Heuristic Performance to an Automated Spatial Computation Approach

Abstract

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.

Visual Analytics Research at Universidade Federal do Ceará

“…To help understanding how high-rate crime regions change over time, we developed a partition approach to interpolate 2D polygon sets that can be used to visualize temporal changes of the crime hotspots as an animation [5]. We have also approached the problem of approximating KDE hotspots to the road network [6], so the police patrols can be performed more efficiently [7].…”

Explaining Theft Using Offenders’ Activity Space Inferred from Residents’ Mobile Phone Data

“…Therefore, the measurement of offender activity spaces can help improve interpretations of the spatial distribution of crime. In practice, if the police were knowledgeable concerning offenders' routine activities, then the efficiency of crime prevention and control, such as hot spot policing and targeted patrol, could be greatly improved [6].…”