PONE-D-23-06563A Location Discrete Choice Model of Crime: Police Elasticity and Optimal DeploymentPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Riascos Villegas,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Both reviewers agree that the study is interesting, and the methodology used sound. However, they both recommended improvements to the presentation, in particular the literature review, and more explicit statements of the research questions. Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 12 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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Siew Ann Cheong, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The research is extremely important as it casts an eye on the study of crime prediction and the search for the type of strategy to be applied by police agencies. The literature specifies the application of random and targeted strategies, and this has to do with the type of criminal demand addressed. The present research presents a contribution for the discussion of the studied theme. However, I make some observations for the improvement of the present study:

1. The abstract could be improved, informing the reader of the limitations of the research, the practical and social implications of the research results, the gaps not addressed in the research, and indications for future research.

2. The authors did not present a specific section for literature review, in the introduction they presented the background of the problem, presenting several informative specific literatures that presented reports of research on hot spot. In this sense, I suggest the authors to consider the following texts, and that from them they can obtain other literatures that enrich the discussion: "Police and fear of crime in Distrito Federal"; "Predicting repeat offenders with machine learning: a casestudy of Beijing theives and burglars"; "Knowledge discovery in research on policing strategies: an overview of the past fifty years"; "Ranking policing strategies as a function of criminal complaints: application of the PROMETHEE II method in the Brazilian context"; "Identification of operational demand in law enforcement agencies: An application based on a probabilistic model of topics"; and "he spatial effect of police foot patrol on crime patterns: a localanalysis".

3. I suggest the authors to explicit in the introduction the problem question and the objectives that motivate the research.

4. In the introduction, the authors should introduce a short paragraph that summarizes the other sections of the article.

The author on page 8 cited as a footnote the following link to obtain the data: https://www.dane.gov.co/. However, when consulting this link I had difficulty in finding the source of the data used. I suggest that more detailed information should be provided, as it is important that other researchers may have access to this information, allowing the reproduction of this research.

6. In the conclusion, the authors indicate the implementation of random police strategies. The authors worked on the types of policing? do they indicate randomness for all strategies? I suggest the authors discuss this issue and reference with the authors studied.

Good review

Reviewer

Reviewer #2: Review: A Location Discrete Choice Model of Crime: Police Elasticity and Optimal Deployment.

The paper develops a discrete choice model of crime location with aggregate data in the city of Bogota (Colombia). Elasticities are estimated for each of the spatial locations and different police patrolling strategies are evaluated. The paper is interesting and provides a novel analysis for a region where there is not much reliable empirical data for this type of analysis.

That said, I think the paper can be improved in many ways. I am not going to get into the methodological heart of the paper but rather its presentation and conclusions.

1. Although the introduction is quite extensive, I believe that the paper would benefit from the incorporation of a more extensive literature review that would serve to bring the paper into the discussion of these types of models and their relationship to police deployment.

2. The literature review should also incorporate a section on Latin America. In the region there are already papers that analyze crime and police deployment from different methodological perspectives, including at the spatial level (geography of crime). It is necessary to insert this paper in that tradition.

3. Thirdly, it would be interesting to incorporate a discussion where the results are analyzed and then the conclusions where these results are connected with other literature, a future line of research is proposed to expand this analysis.

4. However, beyond these particular issues, the paper seems to move between two literatures that are not integrated in the text and neither at the level of analysis of results and conclusions: location of police resources and location of crime or concentration of crime. As it is, it is difficult to distinguish whether it is a contribution to the study of crime concentration patterns in large Latin American cities or whether it is intended as a contribution to the discussion on police distribution. In short: its results, which are valuable, are lost in part because they are not oriented to a particular debate.

5. There are no real conclusions in the paper either. A complete section should be included where the results are used to draw public policy conclusions on the level of concentration and distribution of crime or police deployment.

For the rest, I am grateful for the opportunity to have read this contribution, which can be a contribution to the discussion of crime in Latin America.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Prof. Dr. Marcio Basilio

Reviewer #2: No

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A Location Discrete Choice Model of Crime: Police Elasticity and Optimal Deployment

PONE-D-23-06563R1

Dear Dr. Riascos Villegas,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Hanna Landenmark

Staff Editor

PLOS ONE

on behalf of 

Siew Ann Cheong, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Comments from PLOS Editorial Office: We note that one or more reviewers has recommended that you cite specific previously published works. As always, we recommend that you please review and evaluate the requested works to determine whether they are relevant and should be cited. It is not a requirement to cite these works. We appreciate your attention to this request.

Comments from Staff Editor Hanna Landenmark (hlandenmark@plos.org): Please ensure that the code is shared when you resubmit the final proofs, and update the Data availability statement to declare where the code can be found. Please also include a link to the code within the manuscript text, e.g. in the Methods section.

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Dear Authors

I would like to congratulate you on your extensive revision of the text. I can see that you have answered almost all of the reviewers' questions. The text is much improved. However, I would like to suggest a few changes that the authors say they have made, but which I have not seen in the main text. I believe there must have been some mistake when compiling the new version. I would therefore ask you to answer the following questions:

1) The authors state that they have inserted the following paper: "Knowledge discovery in research on policing strategies: an overview of the past fifty years", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 1372-1409. " ext-link-type="uri" xlink:type="simple">https://doi.org/10.1108/JM2-10-2020-0268" However, I did not notice it in the references. I suggest you include it.

2) As for the other suggestions for bibliography that I suggested in the first round of reviews, I would like the authors to comment on their lack of suitability for the topic: https://doi.org/10.1108/JM2-05-2020-0122; https://doi.org/10.1108/JM2-01-2018-0001

Good review.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Dr. Marcio Basilio

Reviewer #2: Yes: Gustavo Fondevila

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