Citation

Tongo CI. Eur. J. Soc. Sci. 2010; 15(3): 354-364.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, EuroJournals)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In time past, certain heuristic approaches have been employed to effectively deploy a crime preventive police patrol force to a number of precincts. While the results obtained from utilizing these heuristic approaches may provide a technical boon towards maximizing the interception of crimes in our various societies; they are not necessarily expected to yield optimal solutions to the problem of effectively allocating police patrol efforts across various precincts. They are more likely to supply us with good suboptimal solutions. In spite of the efficacy of dynamic programming in terms of its ability to bring about optimal solutions to the police patrol allocation problem; it has not been used in past research. Consequently, through a small cross section of some processed data obtained from the Lagos State police command head quarters G.R.A. and the Lagos State Government, Office of the Surveyor General, Governor’s Office, in Nigeria; this study provides an illustration of how dynamic programming can bring about optimal solutions to the effective deployment of a crime preventive police patrol force across N- precincts