I have a new preprint posted, A Gentle Introduction to Creating Optimal Patrol Areas. Below is the abstract:

Models to create optimal patrol areas have been in existence for over 45 years, but police departments still regularly construct patrol areas in an ad-hoc fashion. This essay walks the reader through formulating an integer linear program to create a set number of patrol areas that have near equal call load and that are contiguous using simple examples. Then the technique is illustrated using a case study in Carrollton, TX. Creating optimal patrol areas not only have the potential to improve efficiency in response times, but can also encourage hot spots policing. Applications of linear programming can additionally be applied to a wide variety of problems within criminal justice agencies, and this essay provides a gentle introduction to understanding the mathematical notation of linear programming.

In this paper I introduce a very simple integer linear program to create patrol beats, and then build up the complexity into the fuller p-median problem with additional constraints applicable to making patrol areas. The constraints on making the call load equal that I introduce in the paper are the only real novel aspect of the paper (although no doubt someone else has done something similar previously), but I was a bit frustrated reading other linear programs to create patrol areas. Most work was concentrated in operations research journals and in my opinion was totally inaccessible to a typical crime analyst. So I frame the paper as an introduction to integer linear programs, walk though some simplified examples, and then apply that full model in Carrollton. I also provide an extensive walkthrough using the python program PuLP so others can replicate the work with their own data in the supplementary materials.

Here is my end example map of the optimal patrol areas in Carrollton.

  

You can see that my areas are not as nice and convex, although most applications of correcting for that introduce multiple objective functions and/or non-linear functions, making the problem much harder to estimate in practice (which was part of my pet-peeve with prior publications – none provided code to estimate the models described, with the exception of some of the work of Kevin Curtin).

Part of the reason I tackled this problem is that it comes up all the time on the IACA list-serve — how to make new patrol areas. If you are an analyst interested in applying this in your jurisdiction and would like help always feel free to contact me.