Northern Ireland - new material (9)
01 December 1994
Review: Coca Cola Criminology Terrorist Threat to Safe Shopping Centre for the Study of Public Order 27 pages 10.
British criminology has finally discovered the IRA in all but name. Two academics at the University of Leicester's Centre have produced a report which seeks to analyse the cost to commercial interests of IRA attacks on business premises
The report is interesting for three reasons. First its characterisation of terrorism is irresponsibly misinformed. Second it is less concerned with the safety of shoppers than with the threat to retail profits and thirdly the report uses survey evidence from a sample of shoppers to advocate the installation of a predictable array of surveillance technology, including identity cards. An adequate response to terrorism the report begins must be premised on "a thorough understanding of the changing nature of terrorist activities" (characterised as a shift from political and military targets to economic and commercial ones) as well as an appreciation of terrorist motivations (terrorists are essentially irrational they allow no debate, nor are they susceptible to reason and largely immune to deterrent penalties).
Although it is evident from the incidents mentioned (the Brighton bomb the Downing Street mortar attack the Baltic Exchange) that it is the IRA threat which is under discussion, the report manages to avoid mentioning the IRA by name except once when reference is made to MI5 taking over the lead role in combatting the IRA in Britain. This quite extraordinary omission means that we are expected to understand terrorism without knowing which groups are which what their political aims are and how they relate to other groups and political movements, and finally what the current state of the conflict happens to be.
The report is sharper when discussing the economic costs of the IRA's bombing of English cities. At stake here is a 368 billion per annum market. It suggests three types of costs. Firstly, there are the direct costs of repairing the damage and getting back to normal. The Bishopsgate bombing for example displaced 20 000 workers and generated a repair bill of at least 350 million a bill which is eventually passed on to consumers.
Secondly, there are the indirect costs incurred through the disruption and loss of trade lower employee morale and lost productivity. And thirdly there are longer-term consequential losses - the erosion of customer confidence. Whole areas come to be avoided particular stores boycotted and other "significant changes in shopping behaviour" occur.
This is as far as the report goes however. It avoids an overall assessment of these costs in recent years. It does not discuss the private security costs of personnel buildings stock and equipment - for instance the cost to City firms of back-up computer storage housed in old London Underground tunnels. Nor does it calculate the costs of the regular disruption of commuter traffic - the IRA claimed 1 060 incidents of this kind in England in 1992. It fails furthermore to mention the public sector costs associated with all this whether spent in England itself, or Ireland.
With such a narrow view of terrorism it is understandable that the report recommends a) target-hardening (eg the City could be ringed with steel for 100 million but this would incur annual costs of 25 million); b) improved surveillance (300 000 CCTV cameras are sold each year in Britain); c) "widening and deepening" police powers (eg random stop and search powers in relation to vehicles); and d) improved intelligence.
The researchers interviewed 849 "representative shoppers" at five shopping locations in the city of Leicester. They found a high level of fear: 61% said they had "thought about the possibility of a bomb explosion". When asked about CCTV only 15% were in any way "worried and concerned" about its use but hardly any of these took the view "that CCTV spoiled their shopping".
The more "public" the location the m