An Overview of Crime Simulation

Artificial crime analysis and crime simulation is an emerging research area that has the potential of revealing hidden processes behind urban crime patterns and criminal justice system operations. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining criminology, computer simulation, and geographic information systems to examine how crime patterns form and what can be done to prevent crime. In the last decade there has been a phenomenal growth in interest in crime pattern analysis. Geographic information systems (GIS) are now widely used in urban police agencies throughout industrial nations. With this, scholarly interest in understanding crime patterns has grown considerably. The central problem of empirical crime analysis, both applied and academic, is that many of the underlying processes that give rise to crime patterns are not visible, and so are not well understood. To address this problem, a number of crime researchers have drawn from the experience of other disciplines to create virtual cityscapes to model artificial crime patterns within a computing environment. This new and exciting area has no guiding text or repository of experience. This book seeks to fill this need, and thus accelerate the rapid growth in this area.