  We investigate at the subscale of the neighborhoods of a highly populated
city the incidence of property crimes in terms of both the resident and the
floating population. Our results show that a relevant allometric relation could
only be observed between property crimes and floating population. More
precisely, the evidence of a superlinear behavior indicates that a
disproportional number of property crimes occurs in regions where an increased
flow of people takes place in the city. For comparison, we also found that the
number of crimes of peace disturbance only correlates well, and in a
superlinear fashion too, with the resident population. Our study raises the
interesting possibility that the superlinearity observed in previous studies
[Bettencourt et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 104, 7301 (2007) and Melo et
al., Sci. Rep. 4, 6239 (2014)] for homicides versus population at the city
scale could have its origin in the fact that the floating population, and not
the resident one, should be taken as the relevant variable determining the
intrinsic microdynamical behavior of the system.
