Consistent spatial decomposition of temporal occurrence of aggressive behaviors: A case study in Bogotá, Colombia

Aggressive behaviors are triggers of personal injuries and homicides in modern cities. Their origin is multicausal, but some phenomena, such as agglomerations and alcohol use, exacerbate these events. Understanding how the occurrence of aggressive behaviors is spatially and temporally distributed in cities will potentially allow making better governmental policies to mitigate them. Traditionally, the occurrence of aggressive behaviors in cities results from an aggregation of the reporting count of this kind of event over some range of time. Recent work suggests that this counting pattern can be obtained from a combination of independent sources of aggressive behavior occurrence. This paper explores the existence of underlying shared sources of activity in the occurrence of aggressive behaviors in the city of Bogotá, Colombia, by using source decomposition. Our results suggest that these behaviors are related to consistent and reproducible independent sources of the activity through different spatial scales in the city Bogotá.