Modeling Risk of Future Terrorist Attacks

Investigators:

Laura Dugan
Gary LaFree

Project Period:
June 2005 through June 2009

Primary Findings:
This project pursued two main research themes—both directed at gauging the success of counter measures used by governments to control terrorism. First, we used data from the GTD, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the RAND Corporation to develop a data base of 1,101 attempted aerial hijackings that occurred around the world from 1931 to 2003. We found support for the conclusion that new hijacking attempts were less likely to be undertaken when the certainty of apprehension was increased through metal detectors and law enforcement at passenger checkpoints. We also found that fewer hijackers attempted to divert airliners to Cuba once that country made it a crime to hijack flights. Our results support the contagion view that hijacking rates significantly increase after a series of hijackings closely clustered in time—but only when these attempts were successful. We found that the policy interventions examined here significantly decreased the likelihood of non-terrorist hijackings but not that of terrorist hijackings.

Second, we conducted a study on republican terrorism in Northern Ireland aimed at determining the impact of a set of counter measures tried by the British over time. This research showed that two criminal justice interventions, targeted assassinations, and a major military curfew either had no impact on subsequent terrorist strikes or significantly increased them. By contrast, a military surge called "Operation Motorman" had a significant impact on reducing future terrorist attacks by the IRA and its affiliates.

Methodology:
For the hijacking study we use continuous-time survival analysis to estimate the impact of several major counter hijacking interventions on the hazard of differently motivated hijacking attempts and logistic regression analysis to model the predictors of successful hijackings. For the study of countermeasures in Northern Ireland we us hazard modeling.

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