Crime is a major risk to society’s well-being, particularly in cities, and yet the scientific literature lacks a comprehensive statistical characterization of crime that could uncover some of the mechanisms behind such pervasive social phenomenon. 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 usually without examining the details of indicators. Crime concentrates in such way that most of the offenses take place in few regions of the city. Here, we developed a framework to characterize crime concentration which splits cities into regions with the same population size. We used disaggregated criminal data from 25 locations in the U.S. and the U.K. which include offenses in places spanning from 2 to 15 years of 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 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.
Contact details:
Llorenç Serra Contact form