Fighting Crime With Mathematics

摘要

One major problem in crime-fighting is that a police crackdown in one neighborhood may simply push criminal behavior into a nearby area. In March two mathematicians, working with an anthropolo-. gist and a criminologist, announced a way to quantify this reaction. "Crimes tend to cluster together in space and time, forming hot spots," says UCLA mathematician Martin Short, the study's lead author. Drawing on real-world data, his team developed a model showing that hot spots come in two varieties.