Scaling laws in the dynamics of crime growth rate

Abstract

The increasing number of crimes in areas with large concentrations of people have made cities one of the main sources of violence. Understanding characteristics of how crime rate expands and its relations with the cities size goes beyond an academic question, being a central issue for contemporary society. Here, we characterize and analyze quantitative aspects of murders in the period from 1980 to 2009 in Brazilian cities. We find that the distribution of the annual, biannual and triannual logarithmic homicide growth rates exhibit the same functional form for distinct scales, that is, a scale invariant behavior. We also identify asymptotic power-law decay relations between the standard deviations of these three growth rates and the initial size. Further, we discuss similarities with complex organizations.

Accepted for publication in Physica A

References in corpus (3)

• Statistical physics of social dynamics
• Statistical Dynamics of Religions and Adherents
• Universal patterns in sound amplitudes of songs and music genres

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Statistical physics of crime: A review
• Human Mobility in Large Cities as a Proxy for Crime
• Empirical analysis on the connection between power-law distributions and allometries for urban indicators
• The role of city size and urban metrics on crime modeling
• A Generalized Population Dynamics Model of a City and an Algorithm for Engineering Regime Shifts