Organising patrol deployment against violent crimes

Violent crimes such as ram raids and armed robberies have a substantial impact on the physical, emotional and material wellbeing of victims. Therefore these crimes typically receive the highest priority from the police. In this paper we present prescriptive models to deploy police patrol units to improve their ability to respond timely to such crimes. These models can also help police administrators to assess the effectiveness of proposals that attempt to advance the moment when the police arrives on the scene. The models are illustrated by an application to real–life data from a Belgian police zone from which some general guidelines are derived.