Management Information System for Police Facility Location

Abstract

It is well known to society that crime rates in Brazil have been greatly increasing in recent years. The Northeast region of Brazil is ranked second in the ranking of reported crimes in Brazil. The Northeast state of Pernambuco, in the last two years, has invested considerable sums in public safety and its crime rates have not fallen. In fact, several factors make it difficult to make decisions on prioritizing investments, such as the lack of a system to support management decisions. Considering that the location of police installations influences crime rates, specifically in police response time, this paper proposes a Management Information System (MIS) that suggests different location arrangements, with their respective performance indicators, to support decisions regarding the siting of police units. The MIS model for siting police facilities uses two methods, the first to find potential locations is called K-means, and the second to select optimal locations is called the Maximum Covering Location Problem (MCLP). The results obtained when using MIS in a Brazilian city, based on the occurrence of crimes, to identify police units, demonstrated the service performed better performance when compared to the current configuration of the units.