SIA operationalises decades of established crime-and-place theory as configurable features, then exposes every assumption for expert review. The intent is not to replace experts. It’s to give them a calibration foundation that didn’t exist before.
These are the bodies of theory the platform consciously operationalises, and the platform features that carry them. Where the live score only approximates a theory, we say so. Where a theory is on the roadmap rather than shipping, we say so too.
| Theory | Key insight | How SIA represents it | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Routine Activity Theory Cohen & Felson (1979) | Crime occurs when a motivated offender, a suitable target and the absence of a capable guardian converge in space and time. | Crime feeds + infrastructure attractors/generators + guardianship places (defenders) + survey-derived security visibility. | Strong |
| Crime Pattern Theory Brantingham & Brantingham (1995) | Crime concentrates around nodes, paths, edges, generators and attractors. | Transit, malls, nightlife, taxi ranks, dense built-environment clusters, highway junctions: encoded in the Infrastructure Ontology. | Strong |
| Hot Spots & Micro-Place Research Braga et al. (2019); Weisburd | A small number of places are responsible for a disproportionate share of crime. | H3 resolution 8 hex grid; forensic per-hex details endpoint; banding tuned to micro-place concentration. | Strong |
| CPTED & Environmental Criminology Multiple systematic reviews | Lighting, visibility, disorder and access control shape opportunity and fear. | Street lighting features, abandoned-building survey factors, sightlines, broken-windows perception scoring. | Configurable |
| Crime Harm Indices Sherman et al., Cambridge CHI (2016) | Crimes must be weighted by harm and severity, not raw counts. | Configurable type weights, intent relevance, severe-crime parallel curve. Approximated today; formal indexing on the Phase-2 roadmap. | Phase 2 |
| Social Disorganisation Theory Shaw & McKay (1942); Sampson et al. (1997) | Concentrated disadvantage, residential mobility and collective efficacy drive violence. | Recognised but not yet fused into the live score. Phase-2 priority for socioeconomic and deprivation layers. | Phase 2 |
Most vendors cite criminology. We employ it. Phase-1 narrative, default scoring posture and ontology framing are reviewed against the literature they claim to operationalise.
Published cross-national spatial-crime work using ISO 37120 indicators to operationalise social-disorganisation theory across Khayelitsha (South Africa) and Fort Lauderdale (USA) with G. D. Breetzke (2023, International Criminal Justice Review). Active collaborator on Community Wolf in the Stellenbosch context. Reviews the Phase-1 narrative, default model posture and ontology framing on this platform.
Crime-type weights, built-environment risk classes, report and survey factors, source budgets, intent presets: every assumption the score depends on is reachable from one surface. Researchers and customers can author named, versioned tunable models (your model, your weights) and switch between them atomically against a tenant.
That’s the practical answer to a deep methodological critique: no single criminologist’s opinion is hard-coded. The platform makes the choice itself the product surface.
These are the rules we hold ourselves to in external communication. We publish them because procurement, counsel and academic reviewers benefit from a vendor that commits, in writing, to what it won’t claim.
POST /forecast/hex through the same platform contract.A full reference bibliography accompanies investor and academic conversations as a leave-behind document, nineteen sources spanning Cohen & Felson’s Routine Activity Theory through the Cambridge Crime Harm Index. Every theoretical claim on this page is traceable to its source. Email research@ communitywolf.com to request the leave-behind, or open an enterprise conversation below.