| One of the significant problems of studying terrorism has been a lack of a consensus by scholars of an operational definition of just what constitutes terrorism. Crelinsten (1978), Laqueur (1977), Crenshaw (1990), and others, however, all agree that this is not an insurmountable obstacle to studying it. Heretofore, approaches have been based upon psychological, social, economical, and societal factors as the underlying basis. Yet other approaches to terrorism have been centered on the specific goals sought whether overthrow of a government, change in the form of government or economic restructuring of a country's resources.;The means of the terrorist and the disruption caused to democratic societies is common to all terrorist groups. In this regard, this research has been undertaken from the premise of studying terrorism based not upon its efficacy to cause change but upon the effects it employs to cause change or to obtain the goals sought.;We have chosen to place this study of terrorism in the framework of a criminological approach, that is to study terrorism through studying acts of terrorism as criminal acts. Police crime reports reflecting criminal acts of terrorism in Northern Ireland for the years of 1971, 1982, and 1992 were chosen as the case subject. Terrorist incidents from those years were inputted into a GIS software program and linked by geocoding each incident with attendant variables such as type of attack, type of weapon used, target, time of day, day of week, etc.;From this information the data can be manipulated to reveal how attacks vary with the type of target, type of weapon, day of week and so forth based upon resultant patterns produced by attacks over a time span. The variables can be regressed against each other to determine how one is related to the other and make predictions once the regression and correlation coefficients are known.;The study of criminal activity by using GIS software and criminal databases is relatively new first reported use having been in March, 1993 by a sheriff's department in California (Miller, 1993).;This research is the first reported classifying terrorism as criminal activity and attempting to make predictions employing the above methodology. |
