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The study assesses the extent of commonalities between individuals who become involved in violent extremist groups and criminal gangs, and the processes by which individuals engage in each group. Following this comparison, the extent to which the empirical results support the potential for anti-gang programs to bolster the resilience of communities against violent extremism and other forms of crime is assessed.

Quantitative assessment was conducted by comparing individuals included in the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) dataset with a subset of individuals drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) along a number of demographic, social, and socioeconomic characteristics.

Supplementary survey data was also collected from 45 former and current gang members in the United States concurrently with long-form interviews, covering a range of variables including background characteristics, demographic information, and attitudes among the respondents.

Current research that seeks to inform terrorism prevention, intervention, and interdiction efforts has been hampered by at least three problems: the lack of adequate control groups, a tendency to conceptually conflate radicalization with mobilization, and a preponderance of research designs that only include data on the perpetrator or the event, but not both. This project addresses these shortcomings by collecting data that includes control groups consisting of non-violent offenders, non-mobilized ideologues, and unsuccessful terrorists, and by modeling mobilization as the interaction between individual characteristics, social networks, and event-level situational opportunities for action. The integrated approach of this research isolates the interactive factors that distinguish violent from nonviolent offenders, identifies the individual, network, and event-level variables that are significantly related to extremist mobilization, and determines which law enforcement interdiction strategies are most likely to succeed in stopping terrorist attacks.

This research expands on the NIJ-funded Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) and Social Networks of American Radicals (SoNAR) datasets to include event-level information on more than 1,400 United States-based extremist plots and financial crimes from 1974-2021. These event data can be linked to data on the individuals and networks contained in the PIRUS and SoNAR datasets, respectively, in order to build a fully relational database on radicalization characteristics, social-network dynamics, and event-level details and outcomes. Data collection used open-sources, including media reports, unsealed court documents, unclassified government reports, and other open-source archived content. To strengthen the reliability and validity of the analyses, at least 25% of the data were double coded, and the project team dedicated the last phase of data collection to conduct rigorous quality control. To analyze these data, the project team used three methods: descriptive and bivariate analyses, advanced regression methods with regularization, and multi-step configurational methods on a subset of 50 event cases.

These data are currently available as an Excel workbook. The "Plots" sheet contains data on premeditated violent and non-violent crimes. The "Financial Crimes" sheet contains data on financial crimes only. Please refer to the ICPSR README for more information.