Exploring the Development of Crime Using Crime Simulation

• In Event: Roundtable: Media and Technology

Abstract

Police forces have limited resources to prevent crime. Hence, information about likely future crime developments can be of great value to allocate preventive resources. A new stream of research in Criminology is aiming to simulate crime occurrences to study future temporal and spatial developments of crime. For this purpose, researchers are applying simulation techniques such as agent-based modeling, to simulate dynamic and complex social systems. The main advantages of this specific method over more traditional methods to study crime, is that agent-based modeling can account for a dynamic representation of the environment and for a realistic representation of the interactions between individuals and their environment (Davies & Johnson, 2015; Malleson, See, Evans, & Heppenstall, 2012). While research in this direction has shown that agent-based modeling offers a great potential to improve existing crime-simulation-tools (Malleson, 2010), we argue that accounting for a detailed virtual representation of environmental factors, such as crime generators and attractors, will significantly improve the accuracy of data-driven simulations. Moreover, accurate simulations of crime can advance research on the developments of crime, enabling “predictions” on where and when a crime may most probably happen, contributing to more efficient crime prevention.

Author

• Raquel Rosés Brüngger, D-MTEC, ETH Zurich