The anatomy of the 2019 Chilean social unrest.

We analyze the 2019 Chilean social unrest episode, consisting of a sequence of events, through the lens of an epidemic-like model that considers global contagious dynamics. We adjust the parameters to the Chilean social unrest aggregated public data available from the Undersecretary of Human Rights and observe that the number of violent events follows a well-defined pattern already observed in various public disorder episodes in other countries since the 1960s. Although the epidemic-like models display a single event that reaches a peak followed by an exponential decay, we add standard perturbation schemes that may produce a rich temporal behavior as observed in the 2019 Chilean social turmoil. Although we only have access to aggregated data, we are still able to fit it to our model quite well, providing interesting insights on social unrest dynamics.

A mathematical model of the London riots and their policing.

In August 2011, several areas of London experienced episodes of large-scale disorder, comprising looting, rioting and violence. Much subsequent discourse has questioned the adequacy of the police response, in terms of the resources available and strategies used. In this article, we present a mathematical model of the spatial development of the disorder, which can be used to examine the effect of varying policing arrangements. The model is capable of simulating the general emergent patterns of the events and focusses on three fundamental aspects: the apparently-contagious nature of participation; the distances travelled to riot locations; and the deterrent effect of policing. We demonstrate that the spatial configuration of London places some areas at naturally higher risk than others, highlighting the importance of spatial considerations when planning for such events. We also investigate the consequences of varying police numbers and reaction time, which has the potential to guide policy in this area.