Rationalizing police patrol beats using Voronoi Tessellations

Computational criminology is an emerging interdisciplinary field that applies computer science and mathematical methods to the study of criminological problems. In order to understand the nature of crime one has to comprehend not only its spatio-temporal dimensions, but also the victim-offender relationship, role of guardians and history of similar incidents. In this position paper we explore a problem in rationalizing police patrolling beats using Voronoi Tessellations which provide a powerful technique to explore variety of criminological perspectives and understand the geography of crime and its control mechanism. The paper presents a method to rationally design an equitable workload amongst the police patrol beats in order to better handle the challenge of crime.