Ranking policing strategies as a function of criminal complaints: application of the PROMETHEE II method in the Brazilian context

Planning traffic surveillance in Spain: How to optimize the management of police resources to reduce road fatalities

Although traffic police enforcement is widely recognized as a key action in the road safety field, it can be a costly policy to implement. In addition, governments often impose budget constraints that can limit the resources available for activities such as law enforcement and surveillance. To evaluate the impact of human traffic control resources planning on traffic fatalities on Spanish NUTS-3 regions interurban roads, this paper uses an econometric model to investigate the performance of police enforcement intensity by focusing on two crucial traffic law infractions (i.e., speeding and drunk driving). After controlling for a range of economic, demographic, climate, and risk exposure variables, results highlight the relevance of visible, human, and in-person traffic law enforcement through regular vehicle patrols for reducing traffic crashes, with a non-significant effect of automatic enforcement. Our findings have important implications for traffic police resource management regarding the effective maintenance of patrol cars and plans to digitalize and automatize police administrative tasks and procedures.

A Systematic Review of the Applications of Multi-Criteria Decision Aid Methods (1977–2022)

Multicriteria methods have gained traction in academia and industry practices for effective decision-making. This systematic review investigates and presents an overview of multi-criteria approaches research conducted over forty-four years. The Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases were searched for papers on multi-criteria methods with titles, abstracts, keywords, and articles from January 1977 to 29 April 2022. Using the R Bibliometrix tool, the bibliographic data was evaluated. According to this bibliometric analysis, in 131 countries over the past forty-four years, 33,201 authors have written 23,494 documents on multi-criteria methods. This area’s scientific output increases by 14.18 percent every year. China has the highest percentage of publications at 18.50 percent, followed by India at 10.62 percent and Iran at 7.75 percent. Islamic Azad University has the most publications with 504, followed by Vilnius Gediminas Technical University with 456 and the National Institute of Technology with 336. Expert Systems With Applications, Sustainability, and the Journal of Cleaner Production are the top journals, accounting for over 4.67 percent of all indexed works. In addition, E. Zavadskas and J. Wang have the most papers in the multi-criteria approaches sector. AHP, followed by TOPSIS, VIKOR, PROMETHEE, and ANP, is the most popular multi-criteria decision-making method among the ten nations with the most publications in this field. The bibliometric literature review method enables researchers to investigate the multi-criteria research area in greater depth than the conventional literature review method. It allows a vast dataset of bibliographic records to be statistically and systematically evaluated, producing insightful insights. This bibliometric study is helpful because it provides an overview of the issue of multi-criteria techniques from the past forty-four years, allowing other academics to use this research as a starting point for their studies.

Knowledge discovery in research on policing strategies: an overview of the past fifty years

Purpose

The insecurity generated, today in various parts of the planet, by the various conflicts that arise in the violence in large cities, has motivated the academy to research the solutions and strategies adopted by local governments in the fight against crime. The volume of data generated by several universities over the past 50 years has increased exponentially. Consequently, researchers struggle to process essential data in today’s competitive world. The aim of this study is to explore and provide an overview of the studies carried out in the field of action to combat crime in different countries.

Design/methodology/approach

The Web of Science and Scopus databases were searched for publications from January 1945 to September 3, 2020 on the topic of policing strategies in titles, abstracts and keywords. References were analyzed using the R bibliometrix package, and abstracts were analyzed using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) with collapsed Gibbs sampling for topics related to policing and related subjects.

Findings

As a result of the research, this paper can assert that in the last 50 years, 3,361 authors have produced 2,085 documents on the theme of policing strategy and related subjects in 58 countries. Scientific production in this area grows at a rate of 5.10 per year. The USA is the leading country in publications with 42.58%, followed by the UK with 8.39% and Canada with 4.07%. As for journals, the highlight is Policing, Policing and Society and Police Quarterly, which account for more than 15.44% of all indexed literature. Regarding the authors, the highlight is Weisburd and Braga. As a result, the LDA grouped the latent words in the articles analyzed by themes studied and presented the list of articles by themes. The thematic map identifies the following themes as basic research subjects: community policing, problem-oriented policing, predictive policing, fear of crime and social control.

Practical implications

As the main implication between the combination of the bibliometric analysis method with the probabilistic topic modelling, is the emergence of a primordial step in the systematic literature review process, as this method allows to explore and group a large volume of data. Another practical implication that is intended is to provide the beginning researcher or any other reader with a panoramic view of the main authors who study the themes that impact police activity in any city in the world, which are the countries and reference centers of the study on the subject and, finally, the evolution of the main themes researched in the police area.

Originality/value

The value of these studies is summarized in the presentation of an overview on the theme in the last 50 years, offering the opportunity for other researchers to use this research as a starting point for other analyses.