Abstract
Crime and terrorism in the 21st century call for advancement in the modeling and simulation of criminal events in the complex environment. This presentation reviews the field of computational criminology, an emerging blend of criminology, computer science and applied mathematics. Modern concerns about public safety and security include a focus on a range of events from less serious everyday crimes like shoplifting through to personal violent crimes like homicide and ultimately to terrorism. Underlying all of these events is a decision process or chain of steps in target identification, steps that focus first on rough and vague decisions and move towards the precise. Minor and major crimes involve people moving about in a known space in identifiable patterns to find weaknesses.
The field of computational criminology involves using computational power to identify: (1) patterns and emerging patterns; (2) crime generators and crime attractors; (3) terrorist, organized crime and gang social and spatial networks as well as co-offending networks; and, (4) cybercrime. Algorithms are developed using computational topology, hyper-graphs, SNA, KDD, agent based simulations, dynamic information systems analysis and more.
This presentation is designed to provide information about crime pattern theory, pattern identification and research in computational criminology. It is designed to identify research areas of potential interest to participants at the conference. Computational criminology is an emerging field that is opening doors for new and innovative approaches. The presentation will show how people (offenders and non-offenders) move about in space with a routine time and location chronologies (in physical and internet space). Anchor points develop; primary routes emerge. Navigation and rules for navigation shape both commuting patterns; shopping patterns; web sites-forums, blogs, and shared information; and crime and terrorism patterns. Crime and terrorism are not random; they appear to follow rules similar to those in many types of non-criminal behavior. Better understanding these rules and developing appropriate algorithms for identifying risky areas is the continuing focus of computational criminology.
Patricia Brantingham, Ph.D.
Patricia Brantingham is the RCMP University Professor of Computational Criminology and the founder and Director of the Institute of Canadian Urban Research Studies (ICURS). Dr. Brantingham is also a professor in the School of Criminology and an associate member of the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. ICURS has memoranda of understanding for joint research with 13 university research centers that range internationally from Australia to the United Kingdom and to Chile. There are special research arrangements with the RCMP, government ministries and other institutes and research centers at Simon Fraser University. Her goal is to continue interdisciplinary research between computing science, applied mathematics and criminology to address the complex dynamics of urban living and associated crime and safety.
ICURS is the archive for police and urban data for British Columbia, providing a research base for collective efforts to model better crime occurrences, offender activity patterns as well as develop effective tools for policy and planning in the justice system. The archive provides the basis for new approaches to understanding crime patterns.
ICURS has 28 university members. Research topics at ICURS include: computational criminology, crime analysis and criminal justice system policy analysis. Specific research use mathematical and computing science techniques such as: Policy Simulation Models; Crime Pattern Theory (perception, cognition, similarity and classification algorithms); Computational Topology (crime analysis, latent links, hot spots); Data Quality (fuzzy logic, dynamic acceptable ranges of values; software agents; statistical techniques); Data Mining (algorithms relevant to Public Safety, the Justice System and Emergency Preparedness (decision trees, neural networks, SNA);
Urban Morphology (directionality, navigation, road networks, connectivity; primitive rule models)
Professor Brantingham developed, with her husband Paul Brantingham, Crime Pattern Theory and Environmental Criminology as well as major research on patterns of individual and aggregate crime patterns. She has over 10 books and monographs and 100 articles.