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.
Programa de Pós Graduação em Informática Aplicada, Universidade de Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil;Programa de Pós Graduação em Informática Aplicada, Universidade de Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil;Programa de Pós Graduação em Informática Aplicada, Universidade de Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil;Programa de Pós Graduação em Informática Aplicada, Universidade de Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil;Departamento de Ensino, Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Ceará, Crateús, Ceará, Brasil;Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil;Programa de Pós Graduação em Informática Aplicada, Universidade de Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil;Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil;Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil
Recommended Citation:
Carlos Caminha,Vasco Furtado,Tarcisio H. C. Pequeno,et al. Human mobility in large cities as a proxy for crime[J]. PLOS ONE,2017-01-01,12(2)