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We consider a class of macroscopic models for the spatio-temporal evolution of urban crime, as originally going back to Ref. 29 [M. B. Short, M. R. D’Orsogna, V. B. Pasour, G. E. Tita, P. J. Brantingham, A. L. Bertozzi and L. B. Chayes, A statistical model of criminal behavior, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci. 18 (2008) 1249–1267]. The focus here is on the question of how far a certain porous medium enhancement in the random diffusion of criminal agents may exert visible relaxation effects. It is shown that sufficient regularity of the non-negative source terms in the system and a sufficiently strong nonlinear enhancement ensure that a corresponding Neumann-type initial–boundary value problem, posed in a smoothly bounded planar convex domain, admits locally bounded solutions for a wide class of arbitrary initial data. Furthermore, this solution is globally bounded under mild additional conditions on the source terms. These results are supplemented by numerical evidence which illustrates smoothing effects in solutions with sharply structured initial data in the presence of such porous medium-type diffusion and support the existence of singular structures in the linear diffusion case, which is the type of diffusion proposed in Ref. 29.