Impact of human mobility on police allocation

Abstract

Motivated by recent findings that human mobility influences crime behavior in big cities and that there is a superlinear relationship between the population movement and crime, this article aims to evaluate the impact of how these findings influence police allocation. More precisely, we shed light on the differences between an allocation strategy, in which the resources are distributed by clusters of floating population, and conventional allocation strategies, in which the police resources are distributed by an Administrative Area (typically based on resident population). We observed a substantial difference in the distributions of police resources allocated following these strategies, which demonstrates the imprecision of conventional police allocation methods.