Decomposing violence: terrorist murder and attacks in New York State from 1933 to 2005

I apply the Beveridge-Nelson business cycle decomposition method to the time series of murder in the state of New York. (1933-2005). Separating out “permanent” from “cyclical” murder, I hypothesize that the cyclical part coincides with documented waves of organized crime, internal tensions, breakdowns in social order, crime legislation, social, and political unrest, and recently with the periodic terrorist attacks in the state. The estimated cyclical terrorist murder component warns that terrorist attacks in the state of New York from 1962 to 2005, historically occur in the estimated turning point dates, of whether a declining, or ascending cycle, and so, it must be used in future research to construct a model for explaining the causal reasons for its movement across time, and for forecasting terrorist murder and attacks for New York.