Agentizing the social science of crime

Using the subject matter of neighborhood crime, we explore how to conduct conventional quantitative social science using simulation as a way of formulating theory and performing empirical tests of theory, thus replacing the dominant methodological paradigm. Here we simulate in abstract form a complete system of social relationships to reflect applicable social theory, which in many cases takes the form of prose. This requires integrating the theories and adding implied elements to make a coherent, parameterized system. The next step is calibrating the model to measures of the type that would be normally employed to test the relevant theories. Re-implementing Wilcox´s (2005) Matlab-based crime model in Java and exploring model variations, we find patterns in the simulation outputs that highlight the potential difficulties of matching a published correlation matrix and are reminded that simulation modeling is more exacting than social science argument stated as prose and based on group-level conceptual constructs.