Abstract:
The research aimed to develop and test a new dynamic approach to preventive risk assessment of violent extremists. The well-known New York Police Department four phase model was used as a starting point for the conceptualization of the radicalization process, and time-stamped biographical data collected from court documents and other public sources on American homegrown Salafi-jihadist terrorism offenders were used to test the model. Behavioral sequence patterns that reliably anticipate terrorist related criminality were identified and the typical timelines for the pathways to criminal actions estimated for different demographic subgroups in the study sample. Finally, a probabilistic simulation model was used to assess the feasibility of the model to identify common high-frequency and high-risk sequential behavioral segment pairs in the offenders’ pathways to terrorist criminality.
