Research Areas

Crime reduction is the primary thematic area for research in the ICURS Laboratory. Projects under this theme address the impact of crime reduction approaches designed to reduce crime and fear of crime while enhancing public safety. We are in a dynamic urban and rural environment in the 21st century. The is a continuing need to understand better complex patterns and develop analytic tools to facilitate research and policy assessment.

Computational Criminology & Predictive Policing

Computational criminology uses theories of crime in an urban environment together with the advancements in computational sciences. ICURS introduced the first Computational Criminology Initiative (CCI) in 2003.

CCI themes/research clusters include:

• Interoperability between justice and urban databases.
• Artificial Intelligence with agent based modeling.
• Computationally intensive approaches.
• New visualization techniques for understanding crime patterns. Crimes and security issues involve human agents, laws and the physical and social landscape. This complexity requires new, adaptable research tools.

Crime Analysis

Crime Analysis covers a broad range of techniques used to better understand the phenomena of crime at national, provincial, municipal, neighbourhood and local areas.

Policy Analysis and Policy Simulation Models

PPS projects address existing policies and programs as well as work at developing new techniques to evaluate alternative possibilities (advanced "what if" models for policy planning; constraint satisfaction methodology; agent based models; linear and non-linear approaches) as well as providing crime trend analysis tools.

Public Safety & Public Health

Public safety and public health research addresses the growing need to identify and assesses the overlap in goals and services between different parts of government that provide safety and health services and to assess these overlapping actions by considering needs in communities.

Policing Complexity

Policing involves levels of complexity that are influenced by crimes, mix of crimes, crime trends, existing laws, changes in laws, court decisions, policies in policing and policies that cover all areas of the justice system, technical developments, training and changes in community, regional and international conditions. This level of complexity requires careful development of a research framework, innovative measures and research methods. Projects address some of these issues and set the stage for future research.