Analyzing violent attacker texts: examining ideologies through machine learning-assisted topic modeling

Although there is an ongoing need for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to identify and assess the online activities of violent extremists prior to their engagement in violence offline, little is empirically known about their online posting patterns generally or differences in their online patterns compared to non-violent extremists who share similar ideological beliefs particularly. Even less is empirically known about how their online patterns compare to those who post in extremist spaces in general. This study addresses this gap through a content analysis of postings from a unique sample of violent and non-violent right-wing extremists as well as from a sample of postings within a sub-forum of the largest white supremacy web-forum, Stormfront. Here the existence of extremist ideologies, personal grievances, and violent extremist mobilization efforts were quantified within each of the three sample groups. Several notable differences in posting patterns were observed across samples, many of which may inform future risk factor frameworks used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies to identify credible threats online. This study concludes with a discussion of the implications of the analysis, its limitations, and avenues for future research.

Sexual violence survivors who decide to report their assault interact with health care, law enforcement, and legal and judicial professionals. Professionals' attitudes about sexual violence and survivors play an important role in caring for survivors and in the pursuit of justice. Despite evidence showing the relationship between service provider beliefs and survivor outcomes, relatively little is known about professionals' beliefs about sexual violence or their attitudes toward sexual violence survivors. Between June 2012 and December 2014, our study examined the beliefs and attitudes of 181 professionals from the health care, legal, and law enforcement sectors in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Rift Valley region of Kenya, areas with a high prevalence of sexual violence. To determine correlates of beliefs and attitudes about sexual violence and sexual violence survivors, multiple logistic regression models were adjusted for demographic and occupational characteristics. Respondents who agreed that survivors got what they deserved (7%) or that survivors should feel ashamed (9%) were the minority, while those who would be willing to care for a family member with a history of sexual violence (94%) were the majority. Profession was significantly associated with beliefs and attitudes about sexual violence and survivors. Law enforcement professionals were more likely than health professionals and lawyers to indicate that survivors should feel ashamed. Our findings suggest a need for interventions that adequately address potentially harmful beliefs and attitudes of some professionals serving sexual violence survivors.

Zoom-ing in on White Supremacy

States use a variety of approaches, mechanisms, models and programs to prevent and combat violent extremism and radicalism. Some of them are newly developed, and others already existing. They aim to enable practitioners, professionals and members of the local community to apply their various skills, knowledge and capacities for early prevention of violent extremism and radicalization, ie to identify vulnerable persons and persons at risk and provide them with the necessary support to be redirected in a non-violent way before committing a crime. Different types of approaches, mechanisms, models and programs are influenced, among others, by the nature of the threat, the socio-political situation in the country, the security situation, as well as by the prevailing norms and circumstances, management structures, resources, capacities, risk assessments and traditions.
 The aim of the paper is to summarize and analyze the modern peacebuilding approaches used to prevent and combat violent extremism and to draw conclusions about their effectiveness. In doing so, the challenges and weaknesses of such programs will be identified, in order to overcome and improve them in the future and to show better results in achieving their goals. The paper specifically analyzes and discusses the EU approach to capacity building in the fight against terrorism and violent extremism aimed at promoting the capacity of state institutions to provide criminal justice and law enforcement, while respecting human rights and the rule of law. Supporting key preventive measures against violent extremism and countering terrorist financing are also top priorities for preventing terrorist activities and their consequences.
 Creating such approaches/models for preventing and combating violent extremism should be followed by a broad consultation process with key national and local stakeholders, governments and the civil society sector, as well as law enforcement professionals and others who can provide support depending on the needs of the process. Such a process should not be rushed; creating the necessary multidisciplinary support for effective access takes time and patience, including from politicians, policymakers, practitioners, and members of the public, who may seek prompt action in the context of modern-day terrorist and violent extremist threats.

Chapter 10 - Threat Assessment and Management

Over the last decade, the diversified spectrum of hybrid threats forced security agencies around the world to refine the tools used by intelligence analysts in early warning tasks. Thus, in order to anticipate and prevent violent acts, law enforcement analysts from the departments responsible for prevention and countering terrorism, violent extremism, and radicalization that lead to terrorism are constantly striving to identify tools and methods that are capable to measure the psychosocial–behavioral characteristics of individuals in terms of mathematical probabilities. Therefore, risk assessment tools targeting terrorists and violent extremists are a major topic of interest for international security experts and law enforcement professionals. In such context, the present study proposes a tool to assess conditional probabilities, built on the Bayes’ rule, which is based on a subjective way of defining probability. Bayes’ rule allows analysts to correctly quantify their estimates, which are often qualitative, subjective, and based on a limited number of indices and observations. The risk assessment tools developed for common violent crimes and for members of the organized crime groups should not be used for assessing terrorists, violent extremists, or individuals suspected of engaging in ideologically motivated violent actions, nor vice versa. Specific risk assessments with relevant indicators should be used separately for regular violent offenders and for terrorists and extremists.

The willingness of friends or family to share concerns about an ‘intimate’ preparing to perpetrate public, mass violence, such as violent extremism or targeted violence, is considered a possible part of preventative strategies. To understand what is needed to help intimate bystanders share information on potential acts of violent extremism or targeted violence, we conducted 25 semi-structured qualitative interviews with experts in intimate bystander reporting, including law enforcement, social service and mental health providers, faith-based leaders, staff in school threat assessment programs, and community practitioners in California and Illinois. Results showed reporting was impeded by multiple factors, including lack of knowledge about violent extremism and reporting processes, fear of being incorrect, difficulty distinguishing between violent extremism and mental illness, low trust in law enforcement, and lack of standardized reporting processes. Practitioners said reporting could be improved by several interventions, including increasing awareness about reporting processes, improving reporting methods and policies, training community members who can take reports, and increasing trust between community members and law enforcement. Improving bystander reporting for targeted violence and violent extremism in the U.S. requires collaboratively strengthening law enforcement and community capacities based on sound theory, best practices, and monitoring and evaluation.

This article provides a brief history of the development of the federal model of school threat assessment, which was created by the U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education based upon findings from their empirical research on school shootings across the USA. The article reviews the major findings from that behavioral research, which demonstrates how it is possible to prevent school shootings and other targeted violence in school. The article also describes the components of this evidenced-based federal model and implementation guidance for schools and districts within the USA as well as other countries. The article concludes with the lessons learned by the authors and their colleagues in using the federal school threat assessment model to handle individual school threat cases and in training tens of thousands of other school, law enforcement, and mental health professionals how to use threat assessment to prevent school violence.

Does ideology affect assessment of the threat of violent extremism? A survey of law enforcement agencies in the United States in 2014 offers a comparison suggesting a small but statistically significant effect: Political attitudes were correlated with assessment of threats posed by Muslim extremists, and threat assessment was not correlated with the number of Muslim Americans who had engaged in violent extremism within the agency’s jurisdiction. By contrast, the perceived threat of right-wing terrorism was correlated with the number of incidents of right-wing violence and not with political attitudes. These findings reflect the context of growing polarization of attitudes toward Muslims in the United States as well as the challenge of bringing counterterrorism policies into proportion with the actual scale of violent extremism.

We present the case of a Canadian man who perpetrated serial intimate partner violence that included incidents of severe physical violence and stalking against female victims, followed by a case analysis and formulation using the second edition of the Brief Spousal Assault Form for the Evaluation of Risk (B-SAFER; Kropp, Hart, & Belfrage, 2010) and the Guidelines for Stalking Assessment and Management (SAM; Kropp, Hart, & Lyon, 2008). The findings illustrate how law enforcement, corrections, and forensic mental health professionals can use structured professional judgment (SPJ) guidelines for threat assessment and management in complex, high-risk cases. The findings also highlight the importance of considering victim vulnerability factors in decision making with respect to threat assessment and management. Language: en

Homicide ranks among the top causes of pregnancy-associated mortality in the United States. Intimate partner violence (IPV) has been implicated in violent maternal deaths, before which pregnant women may interact with health care, law enforcement, and legal systems. To understand IPV and system engagement prior to maternal deaths and to test the viability of using artificial intelligence (AI) for the analysis of narratives, we compared AI and human-rater analyses of National Violent Death Reporting System Restricted Access Data (NVDRS-RAD) narratives for IPV circumstances and system interactions. We conducted a secondary data analysis of the female homicide records in the 2018-2020 NVDRS-RAD narratives. We trained a bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model on 5,082 female nonpregnant cases, validating it with the 351 pregnant or recently pregnant cases. We conducted AI performance metrics for sensitivity, specificity, precision, and kappa values, identified key terms, and compared AI with human-rater analyses. Among 351 complete NVDRS narrative records of pregnant or postpartum female homicide victims, 285 had primary suspects identified. Human-rater and AI analysis identified similar numbers for whether the suspect was a current or former partner and whether IPV history was noted before homicide. Natural language processing (NLP)-identified word patterns highlighted differences between IPV and non-IPV cases. Human raters identified 24% (80/351), compared with NLP's identification of 21% (72/351), of pregnant women before death who interacted with health care and other systems. All AI models had strong performance metrics. Pregnant women in violent relationships interact with health care, law enforcement, and legal systems prior to their deaths. AI analysis is comparable with human raters in detecting IPV circumstances and system interactions among maternal homicides in the NVDRS. These findings highlight missed opportunities across sectors, underlining the importance of multisectoral interventions to prevent homicides of pregnant women.

The Kids Are Alt-Right: How Media and the Law Enable White Supremacist Groups to Recruit and Radicalize Emotionally Vulnerable Individuals

AI and Incidental Findings

Objective To explore the lived experiences of secondary trauma among partners of law enforcement professionals (LEPs). Background Stress is a common occurrence for LEPs. Although research suggests that LEPs are directly affected by trauma exposure, few studies focus on the secondary trauma of partners or spouses of LEPs. Method Utilizing transcendental phenomenological inquiry, in‐depth qualitative interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample of eight spouses of law enforcement recruited from community groups and police departments. Results The results revealed three overarching themes of how participants experienced being partnered with an LEP: (a) types of trauma exposure, (b) the ripple impact of trauma, and (c) strength of couples and how they cope with trauma. Conclusion Findings suggest that spouses are both affected by trauma and serve a supportive role to LEPs following trauma exposure. Because secondary trauma can exacerbate existing difficulties in communication and emotional intimacy within couples' relationships, a greater understanding of the impact of trauma on law enforcement couples may lead to greater resources to help support couples wherein one individual is directly exposed to work‐related trauma. Implications Family professionals should promote healthy responses and coping among law enforcement couples following exposure to traumatic events.

Social and individual grievances and attraction to extremist ideologies in individuals with autism: Insights from a clinical sample