Information Dynamics in Urban Crime

Abstract

Information production in both space and time has been highlighted as one of the elements that shapes the footprint of complexity in natural and socio-technical systems. However, information production in urban crime has barely been studied. This work copes with this problem by using multifractal analysis to characterize the spatial information scaling in urban crime reports and nonlinear processing tools to study the temporal behavior of this scaling. Our results suggest that information scaling in urban crime exhibits dynamics that evolve in low-dimensional chaotic attractors, and this can be observed in several spatio-temporal scales, although some of them are more favorable than others. This evidence has practical implications in terms of defining the characteristic scales to approach urban crime from available data and supporting theoretical perspectives about the complexity of urban crime.