Why extreme violence in the US has police trying new tactics
Across the United States, recent political protests have taken the form of violence against the car company Tesla – whose CEO Elon Musk is advising the Trump administration in its efforts to radically downsize the federal government.
People have vandalized Tesla charging stations and dealerships, fired bullets into one Oregon showroom, and set cars ablaze this week at a Las Vegas Tesla collision center.
These property attacks are part of a broader increase in politically or ideologically motivated violence. Prominent examples, against a backdrop high overall gun violence in America, range from the killing of a health insurance executive to an attempted assassination of then-candidate Donald Trump. Then there was also the mowing down of pedestrians in New Orleans by a truck driven by a radicalized former American soldier.
Why We Wrote This
Wide-ranging homegrown threats of political and extremist violence are challenging law enforcement to change how it operates. Some experts say cooperation among agencies and community trust are essential to solving the problem.
While relatively rare, the attacks defy easy categories. Extremist violence runs from organized groups to lone attackers and from right-wing or white supremacist ideologies to leftist confrontations with police and the recent Tesla vandalism.
To Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, this means the threat can be characterized as “everything, everywhere, all at once.”
In fact, in the search for solutions, some public safety experts say it’s essential to remember that extreme violence is not always ideologically motivated. And the best responses to the varied threats often include general ones, such as community vigilance and better security for public events.
“What it means in practical terms is that only shared solutions can work,” says John Horgan, the Violent Extremism Research Group director at Georgia State University in Atlanta. “While the FBI will be responsible for managing investigations, community leaders, teachers, and others all have their roles to play in not just educating people about the dangers of terrorism but in showing us what we can do to safeguard our communities against these threats.”
A selective approach to justice?
President Trump won office in part on promises of law and order. His focus is on curbing illegal immigration, and he has suggested treating the Tesla attacks as domestic terrorism.
But there are also signs of a selective approach to justice, including retribution against perceived enemies and laxity on some crimes. One of the president’s first acts after inauguration was to pardon his own supporters convicted of crimes in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Jason Riddle was a rare one who didn’t accept that pardon.
On the day of the attack, the New Hampshire man posed inside the Capitol, jubilantly holding up a stolen bottle of wine as he tried to stop the lawful certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. Today, he says the pardons undermine the rule of law.
“This moment feels scary and dangerous,” says Mr. Riddle, a former U.S. postal worker.
The apparent injection of partisanship into who will face legal accountability is troubling, says former FBI counterterrorism analyst Matthew Levitt, now an analyst at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It’s “why we’re in a situation right now where there’s concern about undermining … norms of law enforcement and the rule of law.”
This comes as homegrown terrorism has been on the rise. Between 2013 and 2021, the number of domestic terrorism-related cases more than tripled, with three-fourths of the total 444 cases fueled by racial or cultural hatred, according to congressional testimony by extremism expert Cynthia Miller-Idriss. But starting this decade, deaths from hard-left attacks have begun rising. Islamist terrorism also remains a significant extremism threat in the U.S.
Fusing ideology and personal pain
For those who perpetrate political violence, their story can often be a blurry fusion of ideology and personal pain.
Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, struggled with chronic back pain, according to news reports. Whether that might have affected his alleged is unclear. What is certain is that Mr. Mangione had been deeply critical of the U.S. health insurance system – a view shared by many Americans, more than half of whom rate it as “fair” or “poor,” according to a recent Gallup pool.
Chris Granger/The New Orleans Advocate/AP
Early on New Year’s Day, Shamsud-Din Jabbar used a truck to kill 14 pedestrians and injure 30 others out celebrating on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
Mr. Jabbar, who died during the attack, carried an Islamic State (ISIS) flag in his truck and appeared to be self-radicalized. A Texas-born information technology specialist, former soldier, and real estate agent, he had also been through multiple divorces and financial challenges.
The search for shared solutions
Americans have begun to adapt to evolving threats by discussing radicalization and mobilization toward violence in new ways.
Terrorism has traditionally been defined as an act of public violence fueled or influenced by some ideology. But today, counterterror experts increasingly use phrases like “extreme violence” or “targeted violence.” They emphasize how the path from ideation to violence can be similar, whether ideology is involved or not. Professor Horgan sees this as a helpful shift.
“Just looking at discrete, distinct types of violence may obscure the fact that there are shared solutions open to us,” he says.
Indeed, communities are addressing the uptick in vehicle ramming attacks by installing physical barriers when and where needed. Gina Ligon, director of the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha, says these can include “beautiful security” such as planters with trees that “can serve the purpose of bollards but also not make people feel like they’re living in a security state.”
Special teams that assess how behavior can flag violence have also become common in regional and local governments. As part of his work at Georgia State, Professor Horgan holds regular counterterrorism sessions with police departments.
Police officers, he says, often try to understand what kinds of ideas drive terrorists. Instead, he focuses on “behavioral leakage,” or clues about violent intent frequently exhibited by lone actors. One key to success: Authorities must assure informants that they are protected from prosecution. Fear of negative police attention is a major reason many terror plots go unreported.
Most people who commit political violence leave missed clues. “The notion that we don’t see terrorism coming is complete nonsense,” says Professor Horgan.
One of the most pernicious forms of homegrown mass violence is school shootings. While legal terms and codes often render them “mass shootings” instead of terrorist acts, which are traditionally considered violence intended to sway governments, there has been a growing push to have lethal school violence like mass shootings labeled “domestic terrorism.”
Last year, 59 gun deaths occurred on U.S. school grounds, according to data from the group Everytown. So far this year, there have been 10 such deaths.
Most often, such attacks involve school shooters who had at least one social media account, had posted disturbing content of guns and threatening messages online, and had at least one reported adverse childhood experience, including being bullied in person or online, according to the Journal of Pediatric Health Care.
Just as schools are trying to identify and address the causes of school violence, how the FBI defines threats and focuses resources in the broader population will be a key to confronting increasingly complex homegrown dangers.
Fighting extremism at home
President Trump expanded federal anti-extremism programs in 2019 after a resurgence of attacks linked to ISIS, which the U.S. government designates as a terrorist group. Two years later, President Biden ramped up additional anti-extremism efforts after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. Those efforts have included counterterrorism task forces and programs that engage school principals and social workers to help pinpoint and address potential threats.
Mr. Riddle, who served three months in prison for his role in the Jan. 6 riots, credits the state of New Hampshire for helping him. After an arrest for impaired driving, he says in an interview, the court ordered a breath alcohol meter installed on his car’s ignition.
Thanks to that requirement, he says, he achieved enough mental clarity to recognize that his fervor leading up to Jan. 6 was misguided. He is now concerned that some pardoned rioters still hold the view, endorsed and promoted by Mr. Trump, that the 2020 election was stolen. No court cases attempting to prove that allegation have succeeded.
Jonathan Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, says that while the motivations may be blurry and diverse – including global ideologies of terrorism – the most numerous risks of violence against the public area are homegrown.
“Right now, with the domestic threat, there’s an unwillingness to reckon with the fact that the call is coming from inside the house,” he says.
