On the division of police districts into patrol beats

Recent work done by the Science and Technology Task Force of the President's National Crime Commission included several studies and recommendations which deal with the application of digital computers to the law enforcement and criminal justice fields.1 A study by C. Walston reviewed the present range of police computer applications; work by the author and others described an approach to the development of a police command and control system; while work by R. Finkler and others described a computer-based criminal justice information system. Early in the Commission's efforts it became apparent that the area of crime is characterized by few reliable statistics and even fewer analytically based rules of procedure. It is the purpose of this paper to bring appropriate problems within the law enforcement area to the attention of the analytical community of computer personnel and to describe an approach to solving one of these problems. The area of concern can be termed police management decision-making and can be structured into two general problem areas: planning and operations. As we shall see, the range of the specific problems covers a wide gamut of Operations Research/Management Science activities. However, even though some of the problems “look familiar”, little has been done to develop an analytical structure for these problems within the field of law enforcement.