Using Self-Organization in an Agent Framework to Model Criminal Activity in Response to Police Patrol Routes

The organizational structure of the police is characterized by the existence of a centralized command with the task of distributing and redistributing the police force in a region according to an analysis of crime and the factors that lead to it. On the other hand, criminals are characterized as a decentralized system in which individual agents have autonomy and act primarily based on accumulated experience they gain from their life in crime. Simulation of different strategies of physical reorganization is a first step to better understand the influence that specific police patrol routes have on the reduction of crime rates and how such decentralization can be efficiently combated. In this article we describe a tool for assisting the investigation of different strategies of agent physical reorganizations where criminal agents demonstrate emergent characteristics. We believe our simulation tool is an effective way to train the police in the effectiveness of their patrolling.