On the division of police districts into patrol beats

ABSTRACT

Recent work done by the Science and Technology Task Force of the President's National Crime Commission included several studies and recommendations which deal with the application of digital computers to the law enforcement and criminal justice fields.¹ A study by C. Walston reviewed the present range of police computer applications; work by the author and others described an approach to the development of a police command and control system; while work by R. Finkler and others described a computer-based criminal justice information system. Early in the Commission's efforts it became apparent that the area of crime is characterized by few reliable statistics and even fewer analytically based rules of procedure. It is the purpose of this paper to bring appropriate problems within the law enforcement area to the attention of the analytical community of computer personnel and to describe an approach to solving one of these problems.

The area of concern can be termed police management decision-making and can be structured into two general problem areas: planning and operations. As we shall see, the range of the specific problems covers a wide gamut of Operations Research/Management Science activities. However, even though some of the problems “look familiar”, little has been done to develop an analytical structure for these problems within the field of law enforcement.

References

1. 1.Science and technology task force report The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Government Printing Office Washington D C 1967
2. 2.Uniform crime report FBI Washington D C 1966
3. 3.R F CROWTHER The use of a computer system for police manpower allocation in St. Louis Missouri Department of Police Administration Indiana University
4. 4.M ROSENSHINE Random patrol scheduling Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory Buffalo N Y
5. 5.J F ELLIOTT Random patrol Electronics Laboratory General Electric Syracuse N Y
6. 6.M A P WILLMER On the measurement of information in the field of criminal detection Operational Research Quarterly Vol 17 No 4
7. 7.HESS et al Nonpartisan political redistricting by computer Operations Research Vol 13 No 6
8. 8.R LARSON Operational study of the police response system Tech Report No 26 O R Center MIT Dec 1967
9. 9.E B MODE Probability and criminalistics American Statistical Association Journal September 1963
10. 10.M E WOLFGANG and H A SMITH Mathematical methods in criminology International Social Science Journal Vol XVIII No 2 1966
11. 11.A C McDONALD The use of gaming techniques in police research SA/Pol 12 Home Office London England
12. 12.M A P WILLMER Criminal investigation from the small town to the large urban conurbation SA/PM 5 Home Office London England
13. 13.W J BAUMOL and P WOLFE A warehouse-location problem Operations Research Vol 6 pp 252-263
14. 14.M R ROSENTHAL and S B SMITH The m-center problem Report Illinois *Institute of Technology Chicago Illinois
15. 15.A A KUEHN and M J HAMBURGER A heuristic program for locating warehouses Management Science Vol 9 pp 643-666
16. 16.R P SHUMATE and R F CROWTHER Quantitative methods for optimizing the allocation of police resources Journal of Criminal Law Criminology and Police Science Vol 57 No 2
17. 17.D E CLAPP Parole: viewed as a decision under uncertainty Journal of Industrial Engineering Vol XVII No 8
18. 18.R H ROY An outline for research in penology Operations Research Vol 12 Jan-Feb 1964

Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Computers in other domains

  • Operations research

    • Industry and manufacturing

      • Command and control