Introduction to Crime in Human-Environment Geography: Hazards, Risks, and Disasters as Disturbances to a Complex Adaptive System.

Abstract

Both vulnerability to crime victimization and exposure to the criminal justice system are inherently spatial phenomena, with varying, and often disparate, implications across people and places. The geography of crime is best understood as a complex adaptive system in which criminogenic spaces emerge from the spatial interactions of law enforcement and potential offenders under heterogenous situational characteristics. Disturbances to that system can influence the spatial availability and accessibility to crime opportunity by both offenders and law enforcement, which in turn may produce new and alternative patterns of criminal activity.

This project brings together theory and methods from geography, criminology, and operations research to effectively model and measure the impact of extreme events on crime and victimization. This is a convergent research project to investigate the spatially adaptive behaviors of potential offenders in response to law enforcement intervention and to near and long-term changes environment brought on by extreme events. Grounded in the complex systems paradigm this research will implement an innovative and potentially transformative coupled spatial optimization and agent-based modeling approach capable of holistically representing motivated offenders, potential targets, and the allocation of protective resources both routinely and during emergency situations. This research builds on the current understanding of vulnerability, resilience, and exposure, to compellingly demonstrate how an extreme event may influence the potential for criminogenesis via spatial changes in guardianship due to an emergency. This research will investigate the spatially adaptive behaviors of offenders in response to disturbances to environment and dynamic levels guardianship in emergency situations.