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Analysis of Public Security in a Region of Mexico with an Outranking Multicriteria Decision-Making Approach
Pavel López-Parra, Pavel Anselmo Alvarez, Alma Montserrat Romero-Serrano, Manuel Muñoz-Palma and Luis A. Perez Arellano
Public safety is a widely studied topic due to the effects that can influence a locality’s economic and social environment. Certain events can threaten these environments and cause economic or human losses. For this reason, government agencies in charge of public security have made efforts to reduce violence, such as organized crime and domestic violence. Therefore, locating localities with high insecurity rates is essential to prioritize aid programs. Violence is a multifactorial phenomenon that should be analyzed with adequate methodologies to deal with the social problem. The paper addresses the public security problem in a region of Mexico that has historically been affected by some kind of violence from different sources. The novelty of this research is the applied methodology for the study, based on a Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis approach with the ELECTRE III method, to analyze some persistent kinds of violence in the municipalities of the region of Mexico. The outcomes show the most affected municipalities by violence and the safest cities. It helps to understand the locations needed for attention in the region and new strategies to reduce those kinds of violence. Policy makers can use the result to integrate measures that can help improve the population’s quality of life.
Keywords: Public safety, public security, violence, multi-criteria decisionmaking, ELECTRE-III, municipalities