Can police fight and defeat crime, or just move it around? The answer is “both” according to a new mathematical model of crime patterns.
Some high-crime locations can be cured by police action. Crime goes down and stays down. In other locations, the crime just moves away.
Andrea Bertozzi, a mathematician at UCLA in California studied crime hotspots and how they grow and change over time. She worked with Los Angeles police, anthropologists and criminologists to build a mathematical model of crime hotspot behaviour. “We were able to predict the ability to suppress or otherwise displace hot spots.”
The crime model was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science this month.
Learn more about the maths model of crime at Wired
