Human Mobility in Large Cities as a Proxy for Crime

TL;DR

This study reveals that property crimes in large cities are strongly linked to floating populations, with superlinear relationships indicating higher crime rates in areas with more transient people, suggesting a new perspective on urban crime dynamics.

Contribution

It demonstrates that floating population, rather than resident population, better explains property crime distribution in large cities, offering a novel microdynamical insight.

Findings

Property crimes correlate superlinearly with floating population.

Peace disturbance crimes correlate with resident population.

Superlinear behavior suggests disproportionate crime increase in high-flow areas.

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.