Fig. 4

Bias in crime rates per capita. When crime increases nonlinearly with population size, we have an artifactual bias in crime rates. The linearity in Portugal makes rates independent of size (left). However, in Denmark (right), because of the superlinear growth, we expect larger cities to have higher crime rates, but not necessarily more crime than expected. For example, though Aalborg and Solrød have similar theft rates, less crime occurs in Aalborg than expected for cities of the same size, based on the model, whereas Solrød is above the expectation