Crimes nos Municípios do Rio Grande do Sul: Análise a partir de um Índice Geral de Criminalidade

Abstract

The Economics of Crime is dedicated to study illegal human activity and measuring it properly is a major challenge in the literature. This article proposes a methodology for measuring criminal activity in the municipalities of Rio Grande do Sul combining several types of criminal occurrences in a historical series ranging from 2002 to 2015. Using a refined Bayesian space-time model with the Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation approach, the results measure general criminal activity avoiding problems of estimates such as high volatility and rarity of occurrences in low population cities. In addition, the proposed indexes contemplate the severity of each crime and represent a simple interpretability.

Keywords
Economics of Crime; Municipal Crime Rate; Spatio-Temporal Econometrics; Bayesian Inference; INLA