APPLICATION OF DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING MODEL TO CRIME CONTROL (A CASE STUDY OF BENIN CITY METROPOLIS

Abstract

It is quite consensual that the police patrolling can be regarded as one of the best well-known
practices for implementing public-safety preventive policies towards the combat of an assortment
of urban crimes. Deploying adequate police patrol to hotspots areas based on available patrol units
is even huge challenge. In time past, Nigerian police employed heuristic approaches to deploy crime
preventive police patrol teams to the hotspots. These approaches are not necessary expected to
yield optimal solutions to the problem of effectively allocating police patrol efforts across various
hotspots. In this work, we present how dynamic programming can be used to bring about optimal
solutions to the police patrol allocation problem. Data were collected from the Nigerian Police
Command Headquarter, Benin City on crime statistics across eight precincts. These data were
analyzed using the dynamic programming to determine the optimal solutions to the effective
deployment of crime preventive police patrol force across the eight precincts.