The threat to national security from terrorists acting on their own initiative is a challenge for law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the UK and elsewhere. The UK Parliament’s 2014 threat assessment noted ‘a trend towards ‘low signature’ terrorism by small, self-directed groups and lone actors’ [House of Commons Home Affairs Committee (2014) Counter-Terrorism – Seventeenth Report of Session 2013–14]. Lone actors have become a higher priority for counter-terrorism professionals (UK police, Prevent practitioners and security agencies), but there is a paucity of research into the views and awareness of these professionals. This qualitative study examined how Prevent practitioners perceived the radicalisation and motivations of lone-actor terrorists they had encountered. Participants were an opportunity sample of five Prevent practitioners; all had served as police officers with varying employment backgrounds and counter-terrorism experience. A thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews identified perceived general characteristics of lone-actor radicalisation. Three themes clustering around the concept of becoming a terrorist are discussed: mechanisms of radicalisation, vulnerability to radical discourse, and individual motivation. Participants construed radicalisation as a process over time, accelerated in the presence of generalised criminality or extensive Internet use. Vulnerability was seen as inherent, as well as a product of social context. Participants adopted folk-psychological explanations with mental health problems, social isolation and relative deprivation cited as prominent vulnerability factors. Lone actors were seen as motivated by grievances (e.g. deprivation), pressure from external sources (e.g. rational prospectors) or personal reward (e.g. sensation-seeking). Practitioners’ perceptions of the process over time had parallels with a diathesis–stress model, although there was some support for social movement theory.
According to the phenomenon of hindsight bias, once people know the outcome of an event, they tend to have biased estimates of the probability that the event would have occurred. In this study, we investigated whether hindsight bias affected judgements about the legitimacy of lethal force decisions in police shooting incidents for counter-terrorism operations. We also assessed to what extent this hindsight bias was mediated by factors such as role and information quality. Four hundred and eighty participants completed a short questionnaire that manipulated role (as senior police officer, Independent Police Complaints Commissioner, or family member, plus a "no role" control group), information quality (detailed/good or vague/ambiguous), and outcome knowledge (knowledge of outcome/hindsight versus no knowledge of outcome/foresight) in a 4 x 2 x 2 design. Results indicated that outcome knowledge affected the perception of threat and decision quality but not the blameworthiness of the senior police officer. Quality of information had a significant effect on all three dependent variables and role had a significant impact on judgements as to whether the decision to shoot was correct and also the perceived threat, though not on perceived blameworthiness. These findings indicate that people who have to judge the liability of lethal force decisions are not able to ignore outcome information, and are strongly influenced by the quality of information and by the role in which they are receiving the information.
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