The use of vehicles as a tool to carry out domestic terrorism has been on the rise across the world. This is done by individual terrorists who have or have no association with terror group. These terrorist are motivated by several ideologies that include; white supremacy, hatred, religious beliefs and so forth. These terror acts are hard to thwart as the perpetrators are difficulty to track. This is because they have no communication that intelligence agencies like the FBI, the CIA and other security agencies can detect. These terrorists are radicalized through literature materials like pamphlet’s, books, online platforms and so on. The attackers can only be detected if the family members and the friend’s volunteers to inform security agencies the suspicious changes they have detected in an individual (DHS, 2019).
The chart below shows sample of the damage (deaths and injuries) the use of the vehicle to carry out domestic terrorism has caused in the selected nations.
Data source: CNN NEWS (Yan H, 2018).
According to FBI 2019 hate crime data in the United States are as shown in the table below:
Data Source: the FBI (FBI: Crime Data Explorer, 2020)
The above shows that race/ethnicity/ancestry had the highest number of crimes. Comparing hate crime rate figures with the social media usage in the U.S. there are possibilities that hate crimes are majorly expressed through social media platforms. These platforms provide an avenue of radicalizing citizens who later become threat to homeland security (Clement, J, 2020).
