Domestic Terrorism Case Study

On May 20th 2017 A white male University of Maryland student fatally stabbed Richard Wilbur Collins III, a black Army Lieutenant and student. Lieutenant Collins was just three (3) days shy of his graduation from Bowie State University. This murder was motivated by racist sentiments and was treated as an act of domestic terrorism after authorities reviewed the murderers phone and social media activity. Another recent incident was that of a 47-year-old man ramming a van into a crowd near a London mosque. Controversy quickly erupted over whether the attack would be treated as less significant than others because it was committed against Muslims but not by them. This attack appeared to fit the legal definitions for terrorism but was not labeled

For example, if the victim was killed because of his or her race, religion or sexual orientation. Domestic terrorism is a more significant threat than the “foreign-masterminded variety in part because it is more common in terms of the number of attacks on U.S. soil” ("The Terrorist Threat Confronting the United States", 2002). For instance, a report published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point identified hundreds of domestic terror incidents per year between 2008 and 2012. Between 2002-2016, far-right affiliated perpetrators conducted 18 attacks that killed 48 people in the United States, while terrorists motivated by al-Qaida’s or the Islamic State’s ideology killed 45 people in nine attacks (February 2018 – Combating Terrorism Center at West Point", 2018). The attacks that are occurring around the world can be both a hate crime and an act of terrorism. For instance, the sniper ambush against twelve (12) officers, five (5) of whom were fatally shot, has caused the community to rally together. The intentions of the sniper were to only shoot white male police officers but others were also hurt during the mayhem. The media broadcasted the whole event and brought attention not only to the current injustices between blacks and law enforcement, but the Black Lives Matter

Most are not planned in advance or targets the victim ahead of time, they are merely chance encounters. Sporadic attacks with high numbers of casualties are more likely to be planned in advance, such as Dylan Roof’s murder of nine African-Americans. Roof presented himself as a white supremacist, who murdered churchgoers because he wanted to start a race war. He was convicted of hate crimes and sentenced to death, but never charged with terrorism. Labeling something as terrorism has legal ramifications, too, and is not applied lightly. Federal officials work with a very specific definition of when something is an act of domestic terrorism. It has to have three characteristics: an act that takes place in the United States, that's dangerous to human life, and is intended to intimidate civilians or affect government policy by "mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping”