Digital Behavioral Criminalistics to Elucidate the Cyber Pathway to Intended Violence

With the vast advances in computer, mobile, and online technologies, visibility into an offender’s thought processes and decision-making trajectory has been markedly enhanced. Digital behavioral artifacts, or digital evidence “breadcrumbs” of an offender’s behaviors, are now often left in publicly accessible locations on the Internet—such as social media platforms and social messaging applications—and in locations not privy to the public—such as the offender’s devices. Importantly, early seminal literature introduced and described examining an offender’s actions as series of steps along a path of threat escalation, or “pathway.” The totality of these emerging digital behavioral artifacts allows investigators to piece together an offender’s behavioral mosaic at a much more intimate and granular level, warranting a revised pathway—the cyber pathway to intended violence (CPIV)—that captures the thoughts and actions of an offender leading up to an act of deliberative, predatory violence. This chapter introduces the emerging discipline of Digital Behavioral Criminalistics and how this process can meaningfully be used by threat assessors to elucidate an offender’s steps on the CPIV.

Making Sense of Terrorist Violence and Building Psychological Expertise

This chapter is broadly concerned with the assessment of targeted violence, a term referring to instrumental and predatory violence, framed and justified by a shared ideology in the case of terrorists, or a more idiosyncratic belief system in the case of lone actors. It reviews some of the frameworks developed to identify threat before the crime and to assess the risk of extremist violence after the crime, and discusses the learning that has accrued from postdictive studies and ongoing empirical research, with the aim of synthesizing this learning and deepening the understanding of what drives these crimes. The roles of criminality and mental disorder are specifically discussed in relation to a possible triple pathway model for radicalization that clarifies the role of both in each pathway. The importance of theorization is stressed at this stage of current knowledge, with some suggestions for future research.

The logic of the slave patrol: the fantasy of black predatory violence and the use of force by the police

The background context for this study is the relationship between the right to bear arms and the role of policing in the United States. The fact that the second amendment guarantees the right to bear arms and the correlative right to form “a well-regulated militia” have long been central to the scholarly understanding of the role of guns in American society. Yet few social scientific studies have taken the friction between militias and the burgeoning police departments of the 1800s as a point of departure for present-day debates about the police’s use of force. For the early part of US history, many citizens feared that the police would attempt to supplant militias. In some southern cities, like New Orleans, residents argued that if the city government was going to let the police patrol the city, they should do so without guns. It was the threat of slave uprisings that ended the conflict between militias and the police. A major implication of this study is that rooting the contemporary understanding of police violence in early debates about the police’s use of force can help social scientists better understand how policing is understood and experienced today. Indeed, the African Americans interviewed for this study view the gun in the hands of a police officer as a technology that is rooted in the slave patrol. This is because it is the descendants of enslaved people who are disproportionately subject to police shootings. The article demonstrates this point by exploring a 2014 police shooting. The shooting of Laquan McDonald garnered national attention when, on October 20, 2014, Chicago police Officer, Jason Van Dyke, shot the 17-year-old Black teenager 16 times. The methods employed in this study include: archival data on the early use of force debate, discourse analysis of court testimony from Van Dyke’s 2018 first degree murder trial, and semi-structured interviews with Chicago residents who discuss this case. Ultimately, this study finds that in the McDonald shooting, the gun helps to reproduce the fantasy of Black predatory violence that is rooted in slavery.

Stalking Risk Assessment

This chapter examines the frequency of recidivism, threats, and violence in male and female stalkers. The risk factors associated with ordinary violence are distinguished from the risk factors for severe violence and homicide in stalkers. Common risk factors for ordinary violence among stalkers include substance abuse, prior criminal offenses, making threats, suicidality, and a prior intimate relationship to the stalking victim. Risk factors for stalkers committing severe violence or homicide include appearing at the victim’s home, prior violence, major depression, threats to harm the victim’s children, and placing threatening messages on the victim’s car. Celebrity stalkers have a different set of risk factors for violence. Distinctions are made between those stalkers who make threats and those who pose threats, and between affective and predatory violence by stalkers. The overlap between domestic violence and stalking is explained. An approach to evaluating stalking situations for dangerousness is offered. Increased vigilance is necessary when events humiliate or anger the stalker. Finally, the chapter discusses how to assess threats by stalkers and when to consider seeking restraining orders. Stalking and violence are two separate phenomena, but they often occur together. Because stalking is defined as a pattern of harassment that induces fear of harm in the victim, it is not surprising that some stalking victims are indeed violently assaulted by their stalkers (Meloy, 2002). The science of assessing stalkers for violence risk is still in its infancy. Because stalking has been defined as a crime for only the last approximately 15 years, a limited number of research studies regarding stalking and violence have been completed. The majority of early studies were based on referrals to court psychiatric clinics. These studies had an overrepresentation of subjects with mental illness and were more often serious cases than random stalking in the community. Of the adult participants in the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS) whose experiences fulfilled their criteria of stalking, only 55% of women and 48% of men reported their experiences to the police (Tjaden & Thoennes, 1998, 2000a).