An ABM using awareness space to study possible police effects on distance decay

Research in the area of geographic criminology repeatedly found that most offenders commit their crimes near home and that crime wanes with distance. This has been called the distance decay pattern and counts as one of criminology’s stylized facts. However, such conclusions are mostly drawn from official crime data, which do not constitute a random sample of crime in general. If police have difficulties catching more mobile offenders, we may in fact be measuring the distance decay pattern of police operations instead of offending behaviour. In this paper, we use agent-based modelling (ABM) to study under what conditions distance decay is generated or strengthened. Using awareness space as the basic assumption of our model, we study: 1) its relation to distance decay; 2) the influence of different forms of police communication on the same distance decay pattern; and 3) whether aggregate distance decay has to correspond with intra-individual patterns of distance decay

Predictors of police response time: a scoping review

Background: As rapid response has been a key policing strategy for police departments around the globe, so has police response time been a key performance indicator. This scoping review maps and assesses the variables that predict police response time. Methods: This review considers empirical studies, written in english, that include quantitative data from which an association between the outcome variable police response time and any predictor can be observed or derived. This review provides both a narrative synthesis as well as what we termed a hybrid synthesis, a novel way of synthesizing a large quantitative dataset which is considered too rich for a mere narrative synthesis and yet does not allow for meta-analysis. Results: The search, screening and selection process yielded 39 studies, which presented 630 associations between 122 unique predictor variables and police response time. In order to present the results in a digestible way, we classified these into categories and subcategories. All methodological steps and the findings are made public: https://github.com/timverlaan/prt . Conclusions: Most of the conclusion and discussion focuses on lessons learned and recommendations for future research, as it proved hard to draw any definitive conclusions on causal factors related to police response time. We recommend that future studies clearly describe mechanisms, focus on the components of police response time (reporting time, dispatch time, travel time—or a combination of these), attempt to standardize predictors and outcome variables, and we call for more research into reporting time. We conclude this review with a first attempt at deriving a causal model of police response time from the subcategories of predictor variables we observed in the empirical studies included in this review. Trail Registration: https://osf.io/hu2e9

The adoption of a crime harm index: A scoping literature review

An emerging line of research explores how calculating the harm associated with different types of crime serves as a method to measure crime across times, places and people. A crime harm index (CHI) is suggested to produce a more reliable bottom line indicator of public safety and it would allow law enforcement agencies to invest their scarce resources in proportion to the harm caused by various types of crimes. This scoping literature review maps the literature on crime harm indices published after 2006 by answering the following research questions: (1) what is the rationale for a CHI, (2) what are the possible ways to operationalize a CHI; (3) how can a CHI be used in crime analysis; (4) what are the general outcomes of the studies using a CHI; (5) what are the known challenges and critiques of a CHI and (6) what research gaps related to CHI are expressed in this field of research?

Criminal expertise and hacking efficiency

Criminal expertise plays a crucial role in the choices offenders make when committing a crime, including their modus operandi. However, our knowledge about criminal decision making online remains limited. Drawing on insights from cyber security, we conceptualize the cybercrime commission process as the sequence of phases of the cyber kill chain that offenders go through. We assume that offenders who follow the sequence consecutively use the most efficient hacking method. Building upon the expertise paradigm, we hypothesize that participants with greater hacking experience and IT skills undertake more efficient hacks. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed data from 69 computer security and software engineering students who were invited to hack a vulnerable website in a computer lab equipped with monitoring software, which allowed to collect objective behavioral measures. Additionally, we collected individual measures regarding hacking expertise through an online questionnaire. After quantitatively measuring efficiency using sequence analysis, a regression model showed that the expertise paradigm may also apply to hackers. We discuss the implications of our novel research for the study of offender decision-making processes more broadly

Describing the scale and composition of calls for police service: a replication and extension using open data

This paper describes the scale and composition of emergency demand for police services in Detroit, United States. The contribution is made in replication and extension of analyses reported elsewhere in the United States. Findings indicate that police spend a considerable proportion of time performing a social service function. Just 51% of the total deployed time responding to 911 calls is consumed by crime incidents. The remainder is spent on quality of life (16%), traffic (15%), health (7%), community (5%), and proactive (4%) duties. A small number of incidents consume a disproportionately large amount of police officer time. Emergency demand is concentrated in time and space, and can differ between types of demand. The findings further highlight the potential implications of radically reforming police forces in the United States. The data and code used here are openly available for reproduction, reuse, and scrutiny

The spatial patterning of emergency demand for police services: a scoping review

This preregistered scoping review provides an account of studies which have examined the spatial patterning of emergency reactive police demand (ERPD) as measured by calls for service data. To date, the field has generated a wealth of information about the geographic concentration of calls for service, but the information remains unsynthesised and inaccessible to researchers and practitioners. We code our literature sample (N = 79) according to the types of demand studied, the spatial scales used, the theories adopted, the methods deployed and the findings reported. We find that most studies focus on crime-related call types using meso-level (e.g., neighborhood) spatial scales. Descriptive methods demonstrate the non-random distribution of calls, irrespective of their type, while correlational findings are mixed, providing minimal support for theories such as social disorganization theory. We conclude with suggestions for future research, focusing on how the field can better exploit open data sources to ‘scale-up’ analyses