TerrorismTerrorists focus on five U.S. urban counties, but rural areas not exempt

Published 1 February 2012

Nearly a third of all terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2008 occurred in just five metropolitan U.S. counties, but terrorist events continue to occur in rural areas as well; there are 3,143 counties in the United States; researchers found 65 of these counties to be hot-spots for terrorism, that is, each of these counties experienced a greater than the average number of terrorist attacks between 1970 and 2008

Nearly a third of all terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2008 occurred in just five metropolitan U.S. counties, but events continue to occur in rural areas, spurred on by domestic actors, according to a report published the other day by researchers in the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland.

The research was conducted at Maryland and the University of Massachusetts-Boston.

The largest number of events clustered around major cities:

  • Manhattan, New York (343 attacks)
  • Los Angeles County, Calif. (156 attacks)
  • Miami-Dade County, Fla. (103 attacks)
  • San Francisco County, Calif. (99 attacks)
  • Washington, D.C.(79 attacks).

A University of Maryland release reports that while large, urban counties such as Manhattan and Los Angeles have remained hot spots of terrorist activities across decades, the START researchers discovered that smaller, more rural counties such as Maricopa County, Arizona — which includes Phoenix — have emerged as hot spots in recent years as domestic terrorism there has increased.

The START researchers found that sixty-five of the U.S. 3,143 counties were “hot spots” of terrorism. The researchers defined a “hot spot” as a county experiencing a greater than the average number of terrorist attacks, that is, more than six attacks across the entire time period (1970 to 2008).

Mainly, terror attacks have been a problem in the bigger cities, but rural areas are not exempt,” said Gary LaFree, director of START and lead author of the new report.

The main attacks driving Maricopa into recent hot spot status are the actions of radical environmental groups, especially the Coalition to Save the Preserves. So, despite the clustering of attacks in certain regions, it is also clear that hot spots are dispersed throughout the country and include places as geographically diverse as counties in Arizona, Massachusetts, Nebraska and Texas,” LaFree added.

Types of attack
LaFree, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland, and his co-author Bianca Bersani, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, also assessed whether certain counties were more prone to a particular type of terrorist attack.

They found that while a few counties experienced multiple types of terrorist attacks, for most attacks were motivated by a single ideological type. For example, Lubbock County, Texas, only experienced extreme right-wing terrorism while the Bronx, New York, only experienced extreme left-wing terrorism.

Time trends
LaFree and Bersani also found time trends in terrorist