Scaling properties of firearm homicides in Brazilian cities

TL;DR

This paper investigates the scaling laws of firearm homicides in Brazilian cities, revealing superlinear growth with population and evidence of fractal structures in city networks, contributing to urban complexity theory.

Contribution

It demonstrates superlinear scaling of firearm homicides with city population and provides evidence of fractal self-similarity in city networks in Brazil.

Findings

Homicides scale superlinearly with population (exponent 1.15).

Fractal structures are present in city network connections.

Self-similarity observed across different urban scales.

Abstract

The recent quantitative approaches for studing several aspects of urban life and infrastructure have shown that scale properties allow to understand many features of urban infrastructure and of human activity in cities. In this work, an analysis based on the complexity of cities network is performed for data on Brazilian cities firearms homicides. Due to the diversity in Brazilian population and cities, this is an interesting test for theories recently proposed. The superlinear power-law behavior for number of homicides as a function of city population, with exponent $\beta=1.15$ is obtained. The hypothesis that fractal structures can be formed in cities as well as in larger networks is tested, indicating that indeed self-similarity may be found in networks connecting several cities.