hundreds of individuals converged on and breached the U.S. Capitol building in an effort to overturn the presidential election results. For the present study, open-source research was conducted on 101 federally indicted participants of this event-half of whom were indicted on assault or other violent felony crimes and the other half for trespassing or nonviolent misdemeanor charges. Then, we used the Terrorism Radicalization Assessment Protocol (TRAP-18; Meloy & Gill, 2016) to examine these Capitol insurrection participants indicted for their actions. Four proximal warning behaviors and one distal behavior were significantly found to be related to the individuals indicted for violent crimes. Similar to previous work using the TRAP-18, these results indicate that several dimensions of the tool postdicted violent behavior in this sample. Interestingly, this was the first study to test the TRAP-18 validity in a large group of extremists acting in concert.
Public Significance StatementThis study found that a terrorism-focused assessment tool, the TRAP-18, was able to postdict violent behavior in a random sample of 101 individuals who were indicted for crimes related to the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection. It found the TRAP-18 was able to successfully postdict violence in this large group of individuals acting in concert.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.