Larger cities, more commuters, more crime? The role of inter-city commuting in the scaling of urban crime
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| author | Puttock, Simon Barros, Umberto Pinheiro, Diego Oliveira, Marcos |
| author_facet | Puttock, Simon Barros, Umberto Pinheiro, Diego Oliveira, Marcos |
| contents | Cities attract a daily influx of non-resident commuters, reflecting their roles within wider urban networks -- not as isolated places. However, it remains unclear how this interconnectivity shapes the way crime scales with population, given that larger cities tend to receive more commuters and experience more crime. In this work, we investigate how inter-city commuting relates to the population-crime relationship. We find that larger cities receive proportionately more commuters, which in turn is associated with higher levels of burglary, drug possession, robbery, shoplifting, and theft. For example, each 1% increase in inbound commuters corresponds to a 0.32% rise in theft and 0.20% rise in burglary, holding population size constant. We demonstrate that models incorporating both population size and commuter inflows explain variation in these offenses better than population-only models. Our findings underscore the importance of considering how cities are connected -- not just their population size -- in disentangling the population-crime relationship. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_20822 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Larger cities, more commuters, more crime? The role of inter-city commuting in the scaling of urban crime Puttock, Simon Barros, Umberto Pinheiro, Diego Oliveira, Marcos Physics and Society Social and Information Networks Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability Applications Other Statistics Cities attract a daily influx of non-resident commuters, reflecting their roles within wider urban networks -- not as isolated places. However, it remains unclear how this interconnectivity shapes the way crime scales with population, given that larger cities tend to receive more commuters and experience more crime. In this work, we investigate how inter-city commuting relates to the population-crime relationship. We find that larger cities receive proportionately more commuters, which in turn is associated with higher levels of burglary, drug possession, robbery, shoplifting, and theft. For example, each 1% increase in inbound commuters corresponds to a 0.32% rise in theft and 0.20% rise in burglary, holding population size constant. We demonstrate that models incorporating both population size and commuter inflows explain variation in these offenses better than population-only models. Our findings underscore the importance of considering how cities are connected -- not just their population size -- in disentangling the population-crime relationship. |
| title | Larger cities, more commuters, more crime? The role of inter-city commuting in the scaling of urban crime |
| topic | Physics and Society Social and Information Networks Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability Applications Other Statistics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20822 |