1. ^aSchool of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Mt Gravatt Campus, Griffith University, Qld 4111, Australia E-mail: m.townsley@griffith.edu.au
2. ^bUCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, University College London, Second Floor, Brook House, 2-16 Torrington Place, London, WC1E 7HN
3. ^cDepartment of Criminal Justice, Temple University, PA, Philadelphia, U.S.A.

Abstract

This paper describes analyses to determine whether there is a space-time dependency for insurgent activity. The data used for the research were 3 months of terrorist incidents attributed to the insurgency in Iraq during U.S. occupation and the methods used are based on a body of work well established using police recorded crime data. It was found that events clustered in space and time more than would be expected if the events were unrelated, suggesting communication of risk in space and time and potentially informing next event prediction. The analysis represents a first but important step and suggestions for further analysis addressing prevention or suppression of future incidents are briefly discussed.