Human mobility in large cities as a proxy for crime

PLoS One. 2017 Feb 3;12(2):e0171609. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0171609. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

We investigate at the subscale of the neighborhoods of a highly populated city the incidence of property crimes in terms of both the resident and the floating population. Our results show that a relevant allometric relation could only be observed between property crimes and floating population. More precisely, the evidence of a superlinear behavior indicates that a disproportional number of property crimes occurs in regions where an increased flow of people takes place in the city. For comparison, we also found that the number of crimes of peace disturbance only correlates well, and in a superlinear fashion too, with the resident population. Our study raises the interesting possibility that the superlinearity observed in previous studies [Bettencourt et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 104, 7301 (2007) and Melo et al., Sci. Rep. 4, 6239 (2014)] for homicides versus population at the city scale could have its origin in the fact that the floating population, and not the resident one, should be taken as the relevant variable determining the intrinsic microdynamical behavior of the system.

MeSH terms

  • Cities / statistics & numerical data*
  • Crime / statistics & numerical data*
  • Homicide / statistics & numerical data
  • Human Migration / statistics & numerical data*
  • Humans

Grants and funding

JSA, CC, VF, THCP, CP, EAO and HPMM have been funded by the Brazilian Agencies: Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (www.cnpq.br), Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (www.capes.gov.br) and Fundação Cearense de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (www.funcap.ce.gov.br). JSA has also been funded by the National Institute of Science and Technology for Complex Systems (www.cbpf.br/inct-sc). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.