How Officers Create Guardianship: An Agent-based Model of Policing

Abstract

Crime is a complex phenomenon, emerging from the interactions of offenders, victims, and their environment, and in particular from the presence or absence of capable guardians. Researchers have historically struggled to understand how police officers create guardianship. This presents a challenge because, in order to understand how to advise the police, researchers must have an understanding of how the current system works. The work presents an agent-based model that simulates the movement of police vehicles, using a record of real calls for service and real levels of police staffing in spatially explicit environments to emulate the demands on the police force. The GPS traces of the simulated officers are compared with real officer movement GPS data in order to assess the quality of the generated movement patterns. The model represents an improvement on existing standards of police simulation, and points the way toward more nuanced understandings of how police officers influence the criminological environment.