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      The scaling of crime concentration in cities

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      PLoS ONE
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          Abstract

          Crime is a major threat to society’s well-being but lacks a statistical characterization that could lead to uncovering some of its underlying mechanisms. Evidence of nonlinear scaling of urban indicators in cities, such as wages and serious crime, has motivated the understanding of cities as complex systems—a perspective that offers insights into resources limits and sustainability, but that usually neglects details of the indicators themselves. Notably, since the nineteenth century, criminal activities have been known to occur unevenly within a city; crime concentrates in such way that most of the offenses take place in few regions of the city. Though confirmed by different studies, this concentration lacks broad analyses on its characteristics, which hinders not only the comprehension of crime dynamics but also the proposal of sounding counter-measures. Here, we developed a framework to characterize crime concentration which divides cities into regions with the same population size. We used disaggregated criminal data from 25 locations in the U.S. and the U.K., spanning from 2 to 15 years of longitudinal data. Our results confirmed that crime concentrates regardless of city and revealed that the level of concentration does not scale with city size. We found that the distribution of crime in a city can be approximated by a power-law distribution with exponent α that depends on the type of crime. In particular, our results showed that thefts tend to concentrate more than robberies, and robberies more than burglaries. Though criminal activities present regularities of concentration, we found that criminal ranks have the tendency to change continuously over time—features that support the perspective of crime as a complex system and demand analyses and evolving urban policies covering the city as a whole.

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          Most cited references38

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          A unified theory of urban living.

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            Mathematics. Critical truths about power laws.

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              The New Science of Cities

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: Funding acquisitionRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: Project administrationRole: ResourcesRole: SoftwareRole: ValidationRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: SupervisionRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Funding acquisitionRole: ResourcesRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                2017
                11 August 2017
                : 12
                : 8
                : e0183110
                Affiliations
                [1 ] BioComplex Laboratory, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Florida, United States of America
                [2 ] Escola Politécnica de Pernambuco, Universidade de Pernambuco, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil
                University of Sydney, AUSTRALIA
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3407-5361
                Article
                PONE-D-17-13632
                10.1371/journal.pone.0183110
                5553724
                28800604
                60ba80d8-6fa4-48fa-aacb-8856df0241f2
                © 2017 Oliveira et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 7 April 2017
                : 28 July 2017
                Page count
                Figures: 4, Tables: 1, Pages: 13
                Funding
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002322, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior;
                Award ID: 1032/13-5
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000183, Army Research Office;
                Award ID: W911NF-17-1-0127-P00001
                Award Recipient :
                Marcos Oliveira received funding from CAPES Foundation under grant 1032/13-5. This work was partially supported by the Army Research Office under grant W911NF-17-1-0127-P00001. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Social Sciences
                Sociology
                Criminology
                Crime
                Physical Sciences
                Physics
                Thermodynamics
                Entropy
                Social Sciences
                Sociology
                Criminology
                Crime
                Theft
                Computer and Information Sciences
                Systems Science
                Complex Systems
                Physical Sciences
                Mathematics
                Systems Science
                Complex Systems
                Research and Analysis Methods
                Research Design
                Survey Research
                Census
                Physical Sciences
                Mathematics
                Probability Theory
                Statistical Distributions
                Distribution Curves
                People and places
                Geographical locations
                North America
                United States
                People and places
                Geographical locations
                Europe
                United Kingdom
                Custom metadata
                All crime data are official open data sets that are available as described in the Supporting Information file.

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

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