Reconfiguring police reporting districts in the city of Buffalo

This paper describes a study that was undertaken to reconfigure the police reporting districts used by the Buffalo Police Department in the city of Buffalo, New York. We begin by relating the current configuration of these districts and the resulting problems which necessitated reconfiguration and in turn, motivated this study. This is followed by a description of the solution methodologies that were proposed. The first approach proposed was an optimization based one that attempted to model this as a multi-objective Set Partitioning problem. After a preliminary study, the approach was abandoned because of unsatisfactory performance. A second, more practical approach was considered. This one relied on using Census Block Groups as defined by Bureau of Census of the US Department of Commerce. With some minor adjustments, the second solution approach successfully addressed the unique needs of this reconfiguration problem of the Buffalo Police Department. Therefore, a reconfiguration plan based on the second methodology was used in proposing the reconfiguration of these police reporting districts.