Determining Optimal Police Patrol Areas with Maximal Covering and Backup Covering Location Models

This paper presents a new method for determining efficient spatial distributions of police patrol areas. This method employs a traditional maximal covering formulation and an innovative backup covering formulation to provide alternative optimal solutions to police decision makers, and to address the lack of objective quantitative methods for police area design in the literature or in practice. This research demonstrates that operations research methods can be used in police decision making, presents a new backup coverage model that is appropriate for patrol area design, and encourages the integration of geographic information systems and optimal solution procedures. The models and methods are tested with the police geography of Dallas, TX. The optimal solutions are compared with the existing police geography, showing substantial improvement in number of incidents covered as well as total distance traveled.