I started working on this project in the Summer of 2021.
Citation
Challacombe, D. J., & Patrick, C. L. (2022). The January 6th insurrection at the U.S. capitol: What the TRAP-18 can tell us about the participants. Journal of Threat Assessment and Management. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/tam0000194
Abstract
On January 6, 2021, 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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
Impact Statement
This 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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)