Larger cities, more commuters, more crime? The role of inter-city commuting in the scaling of urban crime

TL;DR

This study reveals that inter-city commuting significantly influences urban crime rates, with larger cities experiencing more crime partly due to higher commuter inflows, emphasizing the importance of city connectivity in crime scaling.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of how inter-city commuting impacts the relationship between city population and crime, improving models by including commuter inflows.

Findings

Higher commuter inflows correlate with increased crime levels.

Models with both population and commuter data better explain crime variation.

Each 1% increase in inbound commuters raises theft by 0.32%.

Abstract

Cities attract a daily influx of non-resident commuters, reflecting their roles within wider urban networks -- not as isolated places. However, it remains unclear how this interconnectivity shapes the way crime scales with population, given that larger cities tend to receive more commuters and experience more crime. In this work, we investigate how inter-city commuting relates to the population-crime relationship. We find that larger cities receive proportionately more commuters, which in turn is associated with higher levels of burglary, drug possession, robbery, shoplifting, and theft. For example, each 1% increase in inbound commuters corresponds to a 0.32% rise in theft and 0.20% rise in burglary, holding population size constant. We demonstrate that models incorporating both population size and commuter inflows explain variation in these offenses better than population-only models. Our findings underscore the importance of considering how cities are connected -- not just their population size -- in disentangling the population-crime relationship.