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Competitive dynamics between criminals and law enforcement explains the super-linear scaling of crime in cities

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  • Soumya Banerjee

    (Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA
    The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, USA
    Complex Biological Systems Alliance, North Andover, USA
    Ronin Institute, Montclair, USA)

  • Pascal Van Hentenryck

    (National Information and Communications Technology Australia, Melbourne, Australia)

  • Manuel Cebrian

    (National Information and Communications Technology Australia, Melbourne, Australia)

Abstract

While cities have been the engine for innovation and growth for many millennia, they have also endured disproportionately more crime than smaller cities. Similarly to other urban sociological quantities, such as income, gross domestic product (GDP) and number of granted patents, it has been observed that crime scales super-linearly with city size. The default assumption is that super-linear scaling of crime, like other urban attributes, derives from agglomerative effects (that is, increasing returns from potentially more productive connections among criminals). However, crime initiation appears to be generated linearly with the population of a city, and the number of law enforcement officials scales sublinearly with city population. We hypothesize that the observed scaling exponent for net crime in a city is the result of competing dynamics between criminals and law enforcement, each with different scaling exponents, and where criminals win in the numbers game. We propose a simple dynamical model able to accommodate these empirical observations, as well as the potential multiple scaling regimes emerging from the competitive dynamics between crime and law enforcement. Our model is also general enough to be able to correctly account for crime in universities, where university crime does not scale super-linearly, but linearly with enrolment size.

Suggested Citation

  • Soumya Banerjee & Pascal Van Hentenryck & Manuel Cebrian, 2015. "Competitive dynamics between criminals and law enforcement explains the super-linear scaling of crime in cities," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 1(palcomms2), pages 15022-15022, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palcom:v:2015:y:2015:i:palcomms201522:p:15022-
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Soumya Banerjee, 2017. "Automated interpretable computational bilogy in the clinic: a framework to predicst disease severity and stratify patients from clinical data," Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems - scientific journal, Croatian Interdisciplinary Society Provider Homepage: http://indecs.eu, vol. 15(3), pages 199-208.
    2. Soumya Banerjee, 2017. "An Immune System Inspired Theory for Crime and Violence in Cities," Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems - scientific journal, Croatian Interdisciplinary Society Provider Homepage: http://indecs.eu, vol. 15(2), pages 133-143.
    3. Soumya Banerjee, 2016. "A biologically inspired model of distributed online communication supporting efficient search and diffusion of innovation," Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems - scientific journal, Croatian Interdisciplinary Society Provider Homepage: http://indecs.eu, vol. 14(1), pages 10-22.
    4. Tichaona Chikore & Farai Nyabadza & K. A. Jane White, 2023. "Exploring the Impact of Nonlinearities in Police Recruitment and Criminal Capture Rates: A Population Dynamics Approach," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 11(7), pages 1-13, March.
    5. repec:zna:indecs:v:15:y:2017:i:2:p:190-198 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. repec:zna:indecs:v:15:y:2017:i:2:p:199-208 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Soumya Banerjee, 2018. "Citizen Data Science for Social Good in Complex Systems," Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems - scientific journal, Croatian Interdisciplinary Society Provider Homepage: http://indecs.eu, vol. 16(1), pages 88-91.
    8. Soumya Banerjee, 2017. "A computational technique to estimate within-host productively infected cell lifetimes in emerging viral infections," Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems - scientific journal, Croatian Interdisciplinary Society Provider Homepage: http://indecs.eu, vol. 15(3), pages 190-198.

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