Crime is inherent in our society and the routine activities of everyday life ensure that circumstances will be created that will facilitate criminal behavior. The very nature of society-the need to go out and work and interact with others-initiates processes and situations that will encourage some people to be deviant and others to become victims. Criminal victimization is a deterministic part of our society but who will fall victim and who will become the offender remains uncertain. Crime, therefore, is characterized both by randomness and determinism, a situation that suggests the application of chaos theory for its study. This article argues that crime is a complex event that is the culmination of several processes emanating from the past. A method called R/S technique, based upon chaos theory, is used in an attempt to provide a different insight into the phenomenon of temporal crime data. This analysis uses an illustrative example to demonstrate that police calls for service data have a memory effect that can be identified by its fractal dimension. The technique suggests a new way to look at how the police system is functioning and raises questions about the situational factors.