SIMON DEMERS

Background

I am the Director of the Planning, Research & Audit Section of the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) in British Columbia, Canada. My resume is here.

Some of my analysis work and research ideas have appeared in various academic journals. Highlights include:

• • More Canadian Police Means Less Crime (2019). Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice (CJCCJ), 61(4):69–100.
    Supporting data and computer code here.

  • Survivability Factors for Canadian Cyclists Hit by Motor Vehicles (2018). Journal of Community Safety & Well-Being (CSWB), 3(2):27–33. R code here analyzes the National Collision Database (NCDB) available here.

  • A Note on the Square Root Law for Urban Police Travel Times (2016), with Cynthia Langan. Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS), 67(7):989–1000. Pre-print here.

  • Riding a Probabilistic Support Vector Machine to the Stanley Cup (2015). Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports (JQAS), 11(4):205–218. Supporting data and computer code here.

I also take on data analysis and computational challenges as a hobby. This previously led me to:

• • Study the Expected Duration of the No-Information Minimum Rank Problem (2021). Statistics & Probability Letters, 168, No. 108950.

  • Hunt for the smallest number that cannot be collapsed to a single digit using fewer than 6 plus signs: 3003344034004. The American Mathematical Monthly published a filler about it. See OEIS sequence A293929.

  • Tackle Problem 12006 in the American Mathematical Monthly. Solution appeared in the May 2019 issue.

  • Reflect on the fact that Taylor's Law Holds for Finite OEIS Integer Sequences and Binomial Coefficients (2018). The American Statistician, 72(4):376–378. Dataset and supplementary material here.

  • Demystify Simpson's Paradox in Canadian Police Clearance Rates (2015), with Kim Rossmo. CJCCJ, 57(3):424–434.

  • Highlight strong but probably spurious correlations with Canadian Crime Rates in the Penalty Box (2018). CSWB, 3(3):105–109. Pre-print at arXiv:1810.05118 was previously mentioned on the Improbable Research Blog. Supporting data and computer code here.

  • Contemplate the idea that Will Rogers Is Jenksing Police Response Times (2018). CJCCJ, 60(3):413–422.

  • Compute the full sequence of 2,137,453 terms forming the famous Commas Sequence in the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS).

I contribute actively as an anonymous peer reviewer for the European Journal of Operational Research, the world's largest academic journal in the field of operations research.

I admire and enjoy reading the work of several economists and criminologists, including:

• • Aaron Chalfin (University of Pennsylvania)

  • Phil Cook (Duke University)

  • Gregory DeAngelo (Claremont Graduate University)

  • Jennifer Doleac (Texas A&M University)

  • Giovanni Mastrobuoni (University of Turin)

  • Justin McCrary (Columbia University)

  • Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi (Columbia University)

  • Emily Owens (UC Irvine)

  • Steven Raphael (UC Berkeley)

  • Rylan Simpson (Simon Fraser University)

I also enjoy reading the timeless work of statisticians and mathematicians like:

• • Herbert Robbins (formerly at Columbia University)

  • Thomas S. Ferguson (retired from UCLA)

  • Steve Butler (Iowa State University)

  • Richard C. Larson (MIT)

Contact Information

Email: simdem@outlook.com