Human mobility in large cities as a proxy for crime

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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.

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Statistical physics of crime: A review

Maria D'Orsogna, Matjaž Perc (2015)

Containing the spread of crime in urban societies remains a major challenge. Empirical evidence suggests that, if left unchecked, crimes may be recurrent and proliferate. On the other hand, eradicating a culture of crime may be difficult, especially under extreme social circumstances that impair the creation of a shared sense of social responsibility. Although our understanding of the mechanisms that drive the emergence and diffusion of crime is still incomplete, recent research highlights applied mathematics and methods of statistical physics as valuable theoretical resources that may help us better understand criminal activity. We review different approaches aimed at modeling and improving our understanding of crime, focusing on the nucleation of crime hotspots using partial differential equations, self-exciting point process and agent-based modeling, adversarial evolutionary games, and the network science behind the formation of gangs and large-scale organized crime. We emphasize that statistical physics of crime can relevantly inform the design of successful crime prevention strategies, as well as improve the accuracy of expectations about how different policing interventions should impact malicious human activity that deviates from social norms. We also outline possible directions for future research, related to the effects of social and coevolving networks and to the hierarchical growth of criminal structures due to self-organization.

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Collective behavior in the spatial spreading of obesity

Shlomo Havlin, , … (2012)

Obesity prevalence is increasing in many countries at alarming levels. A difficulty in the conception of policies to reverse these trends is the identification of the drivers behind the obesity epidemics. Here, we implement a spatial spreading analysis to investigate whether obesity shows spatial correlations, revealing the effect of collective and global factors acting above individual choices. We find a regularity in the spatial fluctuations of their prevalence revealed by a pattern of scale-free long-range correlations. The fluctuations are anomalous, deviating in a fundamental way from the weaker correlations found in the underlying population distribution indicating the presence of collective behavior, i.e., individual habits may have negligible influence in shaping the patterns of spreading. Interestingly, we find the same scale-free correlations in economic activities associated with food production. These results motivate future interventions to investigate the causality of this relation providing guidance for the implementation of preventive health policies.

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Statistical Signs of Social Influence on Suicides

Hygor Piaget M. Melo, Andre Moreira, Élcio Batista … (2014)

By treating the suicide as a social fact, Durkheim envisaged that suicide rates should be determined by the connections between people and society. Under the same framework, he considered that crime is bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life. The social effect on the occurrence of homicides has been previously substantiated, and confirmed here, in terms of a superlinear scaling relation: by doubling the population of a Brazilian city results in an average increment of 135% in the number of homicides, rather than the expected isometric increase of 100%, as found, for example, for the mortality due to car crashes. Here we present statistical signs of the social influence on the suicide occurrence in cities. Differently from homicides (superlinear) and fatal events in car crashes (isometric), we find sublinear scaling behavior between the number of suicides and city population, with allometric power-law exponents, β = 0.84 ± 0.02 and 0.87 ± 0.01, for all cities in Brazil and US counties, respectively. Also for suicides in US, but using the Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), we obtain β = 0.88 ± 0.01.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Luís A. Nunes Amaral: Role: Editor

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): PLoS One

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): PLoS ONE

Journal ID (publisher-id): plos

Journal ID (pmc): plosone

Title: PLoS ONE

Publisher: Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )

ISSN (Electronic): 1932-6203

Publication date Collection: 2017

Publication date (Electronic): 3 February 2017

Volume: 12

Issue: 2

Electronic Location Identifier: e0171609

Affiliations

[1 ]Programa de Pós Graduação em Informática Aplicada, Universidade de Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil

[2 ]Departamento de Ensino, Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Ceará, Crateús, Ceará, Brasil

[3 ]Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil

Northwestern University, UNITED STATES

Author notes

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

Conceptualization: CC VF THCP CP HPMM EAO JSA.
Data curation: CC CP HPMM EAO.
Formal analysis: CC VF THCP CP HPMM EAO JSA.
Funding acquisition: VF THCP JSA.
Investigation: CC VF THCP CP HPMM EAO JSA.
Methodology: CC VF THCP CP HPMM EAO JSA.
Project administration: VF THCP JSA.
Resources: VF THCP JSA.
Software: CC CP HPMM EAO.
Supervision: VF THCP JSA.
Validation: CC VF THCP CP HPMM EAO JSA.
Visualization: CC VF THCP CP HPMM EAO JSA.
Writing – original draft: CC VF THCP CP HPMM EAO JSA.
Writing – review & editing: CC VF THCP CP HPMM EAO JSA.

* E-mail: caminha@ 123456unifor.br

Article

Publisher ID: PONE-D-16-42083

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0171609

PMC ID: 5291516

PubMed ID: 28158268

SO-VID: d81c34a8-c100-424e-8205-079ee099152c

License:

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

Date received : 21 October 2016

Date accepted : 23 January 2017

Page count

Figures: 7, Tables: 0, Pages: 13

Funding

Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100005283, Fundação Cearense de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico;

Award Recipient : Tarcisio H. C. Pequeno

Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100005283, Fundação Cearense de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico;

Award Recipient : Vasco Furtado

Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100005283, Fundação Cearense de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico;

Award Recipient : Carlos Caminha

Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100005283, Fundação Cearense de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico;

Award Recipient : José S. Andrade

Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002322, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior;

Award Recipient : Carlos Caminha

Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002322, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior;

Award Recipient : Vasco Furtado

Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002322, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior;

Award Recipient : Tarcisio H. C. Pequeno

Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002322, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior;

Award Recipient : José S. Andrade

Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002322, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior;

Award Recipient : Erneson A. Oliveira