Agent-Based Modelling and Crime in Leeds

Criminologists are becoming increasingly aware of the important role that “place” plays in crime occurrences [23]. However, the relationship between crime and the physical environment is complex [11]. It has been shown that the physical form of an area, including natural features and the design of the built environment, has a significant impact on local communities and on crime in those communities [7]. As well as considering physical characteristics, it is important to understand that individual peoples’ perceptions of their environment will also affect their behaviour [4]. Using burglary as an example, most offenders will only commit a crime if they are certain that residents are not home [47], are familiar with the chosen area [23] and do not think that other neighbours will notice them or intervene [14, 38]. How an area is built socially will also have an affect on crime because, as Bottoms et al. [7] comment, “communities, like individuals, can have careers in crime”. The socioeconomic status and demographics of an area are particularly important, but their relationships to crime are non-trivial. For example: burglaries occur disproportionately in areas with high socioeconomic status and in particular when those areas are close to areas with high offender rates [2, 8, 44]; but other crime types, such as violent crime, are often associated with areas of high unemployment and low socioeconomic status [11]. Social cohesion also has extremely important relationship to crime [14, 30, 38, 45, 47] and therefore social relationships must be considered and implemented in the model.