Political violence is on the rise, expert says

The assassination of Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark and the attempted assassination of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette are just the latest in a string of recent political violence.

Just in the past two months alone, a gunman killed two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, a man firebombed a Colorado march calling for the release of Israeli hostages and an arsonist set ablaze the residence of the governor of Pennsylvania.

Jillian Peterson is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University and also co-founder of The Violence Project, which does research on mass violence. She joined Minnesota Now to talk about political violence.

The following conversation was edited for length and clarity. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

What has stood out to you about the alleged political violence that’s taken place here in Minnesota?

You know, it’s so stunning. I’ve been so deeply saddened and shocked. At the Violence Prevention Project Research Center, we study mass shootings, school shootings, we study all different forms of homicide. But this trend for political violence — this very kind of public violence meant to get a message out and instill fear — is something that we’re seeing on the rise.

It is not something I expected to be here in the Twin Cities and to be this stunning, but I think it really brings it home for everyone. It’s a trend that we’re trying to understand, sort of what is pushing individuals to do this, and how do we get in front of it and prevent it before it happens?

What is it about Minnesota that you feel made this surprising?

I think it’s surprising when it happens anywhere, but I think Minnesota does have a reputation for sort of this ‘Minnesota Nice.’ We're in the Midwest. People come together.

Our political leadership is typically able to work across the aisle and get things done. It just doesn’t seem like a really politically charged place, which I think made this sort of extra shocking.

What have you seen that contributes to radicalizing people? Do you think it's happening more often?

I think it always takes a while for the details to emerge, right? What were the warning signs? What was the pathway to violence? What could have been done? It takes months for that to come out.

What we see is it tends to be men who are in some sort of crisis: financially, with a relationship, a mental health crisis. They tend to be really kind of hopeless and suicidal. And these are designed to be final acts. They don’t usually expect to survive.

They think they’re going to go out kind of in this blaze. Force people to see them, force people to know their names and their face and then try to get this message of kind of anger and hate out into the world when they do it.

Do you feel acts of mass violence and political violence have become normalized?

I do feel that way, and part of it is mass shootings and sort of horrific public acts of violence happen so often that I think you kind of have to become desensitized to it, because you can't walk around horrified at every moment. But at the same time, we also can't let ourselves get that way and just kind of accept that this is part of American society.

I have never personally experienced something like we've seen the last couple days. Just the incredible fear, the fact that he wasn’t caught for so long, that there were all these other names on the list, that nobody knew what was going to happen next.

That to me did feel like a different level of creating fear and chaos in our community. But I do think we have to stay vigilant, and we can’t just talk about prevention after something horrific happens. We have to keep talking about it, even when the headlines shift.

What do you think contributes to the overall horror of an event like this?

Yeah, that did feel different this time compared to other sort of horrific tragedies that I've studied. In a mass shooting, where a lot of people are killed at once, it’s typically over fairly quickly. This dragged on and I think it's the fear that this perpetrator was trying to create.

He was somewhat successful in creating it. People were on edge. People were locked in their homes. People sort of had all of their eyes out and were hyper vigilant. That takes a while to sort of collectively come down from, certainly and it’s just another element of what this type of violence can do to our collective conscience. It’s very stressful and really difficult to come back from.

What are you going to be watching for as we learn more about any possible motive?

We’re always asking, what were the warning signs? Who could have seen something or noticed something? What was missed? We tend to see these types of large-scale violence, that there are always warning signs. Nobody quite knows what to do with the information or really anticipates this is what was going to happen. But typically people know something was wrong.

I think here, we’re looking at how he became radicalized and also the extent of the planning that went into this. Like where he got his police uniform, his vehicle and all of his guns. There will be close eyes on all of that.