Research completed!

I have recently completed my burglary simulation PhD and a copy of the thesis will be made available on my University of Leeds home page. There are lots of papers forthcoming which discuss the results and the implications for crime simulation and environmental criminology, I'll post them as they work their way through the reviewing process. The model itself is also going to be made available, and I'm hoping to make it more usable for other researchers and policy makers over the next few months.

In the thesis, I ran a scenario in Leeds, UK, that tried to predict the effects of a major urban development scheme on individual household burglary risk. The model simulated the daily movements "potential burglars" and the resulting crime patterns before and after the regeneration. Interestingly, the model predicted that a few houses in particular will face a disproportionately high risk as a result of the regeneration, due to the changing behaviour of the simulated burglars. The image below shows which houses might receive more (red) and fewer (green) burglaries once the urban development has finished. I am going to speak to policy-makers in Leeds about this in the coming weeks to see what they think about the results and whether or not some policy changes might come out of the research.




















And finally a quick plug to finish this post. I recently had a paper published in the journal "Computers, Environment and Urban Systems" which illustrates a working example of the prototype burglary simulation, based on an abstract city and the research was also mentioned in an article in The Guardian newspaper.