'Lone wolf' attacks are difficult to detect — and difficult to prevent

Corrections and clarifications: An earlier version of this story misspelled Booth Gunter's last name.It also misidentified Rhodesia. That's the former name of what is now Zimbabwe.

The shooting of nine people by a white gunman inside a Charleston, S.C., black church comes amid a recent surge in violent hate groups and incidents where "lone wolf" attacks are increasingly common, according to groups who monitor hate crimes.

Police on Thursday arrested Dylann Roof, 21, for allegedly opening fire in the church Wednesday evening and killing nine people, including the church's pastor. Roof's Facebook page revealed photos of him wearing a jacket with the patches of flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe — flags popular with modern-day white supremacists.

A March study from the Southern Poverty Law Center of "lone wolf" and "leaderless resistance" political violence found that just one or two people carried out 90% of each domestic attacks or planned attacks the past six years. These incidents occurred, on average, once every 34 days.

Lone wolf attacks are often difficult to detect and prevent, as assailants are able to hide their intentions right up to the day of attack, said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

"Unfortunately there are thousands of young men like (Roof) who are looking for an identity larger than themselves," Cohen said. "We've seen a drifting away from organized white supremacy and the prevalence of lone wolf attacks."

What makes this case unique is the level of violence behind it. Although attacks on black churches have been common throughout U.S. history, the recent attack is one of the deadliest — more lethal even than the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, which killed four girls, Cohen said.

In 2013, the most recent year for which statistics are available, nearly 2,300 hate crimes were directed against African Americans, down from 2,600 in 2010, according to the FBI.

"The majority of these incidents involve only one or two victims at a time, so they often don't rise to media attention or engage a debate about terrorism," said J.M. Berger, a terrorism analyst.

But the number of extreme-right hate groups, which include white supremacists and anti-government militias, and criminal incidents from the groups have surged since 2009, said Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research of the Anti-Defamation League. The surge is mostly fueled by anti-government groups, which proliferated following the 2008 election of President Obama.

Recent incidents include the 2012 shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., where skinhead Wade Michael Page killed six people and wounded four others before killing himself, and the attack last year on a Jewish institution in Overland Park, Kan., by longtime white supremacist Frazier Glenn Miller, which killed three people, including one child.

Early signs — the white supremacist patches, the targeting of a predominately African-American church — indicate Roof is likely the latest on that list. Like the others, he likely acted alone, Pitcavage said.

"There's a chance that the suspect in this shooting may end up fitting a classic lone-wolf profile," he said.

Part of the challenge in combating these types of crimes is hate crimes tend to be vastly under-reported, said Booth Gunter, a senior editor with the Southern Poverty Law Center. In its most recent Hate Crime Statistics, the FBI reported 5,928 hate crime incidents in 2013. But a 2013 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics said 293,800 hate crimes occurred in 2012. The BJS study found about 90% of hate crimes were violent and 60% were not reported to police.

"That leads the public to believe this is not the problem that it really is," Gunter said.