# How does a police station in SimCity keep a street safe? Nobody ever walks out of it.

- Series: [How It Spawns](https://miu.fm/howitspawns.md)
- Published: 2026-10-20
- Page: https://miu.fm/howitspawns/how-does-a-police-station-in-simcity-keep-a-street-safe

## Story

How does a police station in SimCity keep a street safe? Nobody ever walks out of it.

In SimCity (Maxis, 1989), crime grows in the crowded, cheap parts of town, and a police station brings it down nearby. But only so far. The game's own code (the Unix version of SimCity, which its publisher EA released as open source under the name Micropolis) shows why.

A police station is one number: 1000 at full funding, written into a coarse grid with one square for every 8 by 8 tiles. Without power it's halved, and halved again without a road. Then the game blurs that grid three times: each square becomes half itself plus an eighth of each neighbor. Crime on each little block is one sum: 128, minus the land's value, plus how crowded it is, minus that blurred police number.

So a station's reach is just where its blur fades. A few blocks out, there's almost nothing left of it.

The city, its land values and crowding in this film are our own simplified version, built in code; the blur and the crime sum are run exactly as the code has them. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Electronic Arts or Maxis.

Which city builder's hidden math should we cut open next?

Sources: SimCity's Unix version source code, released by Electronic Arts under the GPL as Micropolis (s_scan.c CrimeScan and SmoothPSMap, s_sim.c DoSPZone).
Sounds: our own, made in code.

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