Crime Modeling with Truncated L\'evy Flights for Residential Burglary Models

TL;DR

This paper develops a continuum model using truncated Le9vy flights for residential burglary, showing local diffusion as a universal limit and comparing law enforcement strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a mean-field continuum model with truncated Le9vy flights for crime modeling, bridging agent-based simulations and local diffusion equations.

Findings

Continuum model agrees well with agent-based simulations.

Local Laplace diffusion emerges as the universal limit.

Effectiveness of law enforcement strategies is quantitatively compared.

Abstract

Statistical agent-based models for crime have shown that repeat victimization can lead to predictable crime hotspots (see e.g. Short et al., Math. Models Methods Appl., 2008), then a recent study in one space dimension (Chaturapruek et al., SIAM J. Appl. Math, 2013) shows that the hotspot dynamics changes when movement patterns of the criminals involve long-tailed L\'evy distributions for the jump length as opposed to classical random walks. In reality, criminals move in confined areas with a maximum jump length. In this paper we develop a mean-field continuum model with truncated L\'evy flights for residential burglary in one space dimension. The continuum model yields local Laplace diffusion, rather than fractional diffusion. We present an asymptotic theory to derive the continuum equations and show excellent agreement between the continuum model and the agent-based simulations. This suggests that local diffusion models are universal for continuum limits of this problem, the important quantity being the diffusion coefficient. Law enforcement agents are also incorporated into the model, and the relative effectiveness of their deployment strategies are compared quantitatively.