Urban City: Crime Attractors and Offender Mobility

This article develops a generalizable agent-based simulation model of crime. This model is a direct application of a diffusion model of residential burglary and offender mobility by Short et al. [31] to real world crime. Offender mobility is modeled through biased random movement and crime attractiveness of a location is derived from past crimes, diffusion of information and memory decay of past events. Simulations use realistic spatial and crime data for Vancouver, Canada with an error analysis performed at the macro, meso, and micro level. The experimental results are convincing, achieving Pearson Correlation values of 0.988, 0.909, and 0.732 for each level respectively using a Truncated Levy Flight mobility framework. Without a mobility framework, we were able to achieve 0.997, 0.954, and 0.645 for these same levels.