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.
Highlights
The dynamics of crime and the impact of social relations on the increase of violence has been the object of study in several areas such as Social Sciences [1], Criminology [2,3,4], Computing [5,6,7,8,9], Economics [10] and Physics [11,12,13,14,15,16,17]
We identified that the incidence of property crimes has a superlinear allometric relationship, with the floating population in certain areas of the city
The relations obtained between disturbing the peace (DP) and floating population (FLO) and property crimes (PC) and POP are closer to isometric, with exponents β = 0.93 ± 0.10 and β = 1.01 ± 0.06 respectively, the low values of the corresponding determination coefficients indicate that these results should be interpreted with caution
Summary
The dynamics of crime and the impact of social relations on the increase of violence has been the object of study in several areas such as Social Sciences [1], Criminology [2,3,4], Computing [5,6,7,8,9], Economics [10] and Physics [11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. In 2007, Bettencourt et al [21] revealed that allometric relationships are statistically present in many aspects of city infrastructures and dynamics These allometric relationships could be described by a power law function, Y = aXβ, where usually X is the population, Y is a social indicator, a is a constant and β is the allometric exponent. They observed a characteristic superlinear relation between the number of serious crimes and the resident population in the United States (US) cities which clearly denotes the an intricate social.
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