Fig. 3

The scaling laws of crime. We find evidence for a nonlinear relationship between crime and population size in more than half of the data sets. In most considered countries, theft exhibits superlinearity, whereas burglary tends to display linearity. In the plot, the lines represent the error bars for the estimated \(\beta\) of each country–crime for two consecutive years; circles denote a lack of nonlinearity plausibility; triangles represent superlinearity, and upside-down triangles indicate sublinearity