Chapman Students Play Vital Role in NCITE Research on Threats to Public Officials

By Eva Burklund
NCITE student communications assistant

You only need to look at recent headlines to get a sense that threats against public officials are on the rise.

An armed Utah man accused of threatening the president is shot and killed by authorities after a violent encounter. An Illinois woman is arrested after sending emails threatening to kill Donald Trump and his son Barron. A Texas woman is charged with threatening a Washington, D.C. judge, all Democrats, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

NCITE is leading the national conversation on the rising problem of threats to public officials, thanks to a research project led by Chapman University’s Pete Simi, Ph.D. But documenting the scope the problem wouldn’t be possible without the student researchers on Simi’s team.

“Looking at the data, there's a great mix of different belief systems, political beliefs, and personal beliefs, as well as the victims that are being targeted,” said Maneesa Ghotbi, a Chapman business graduate and former research assistant on the project. “The diversity of not only the actors, but also the victims, has been the most shocking to me because, especially within the media, it's portrayed very black and white, one side or the other."

The team makes sense of this range by categorizing the perpetrators and victims based on traits such as age, gender, race, and ideology, among others. While some characteristics are easy to code, others aren’t as clear-cut.

“Going through and trying to figure out what ideological motivation these people have, and if we can even fit them into a category, has been super interesting,” said Natalie Standridge, a Chapman psychology graduate and former research assistant on the project. “We ended up making another category because there are some people who have an ideological motivation, but they don't fall into the specific ones we're coding for."

In some cases, the people who make threats don’t necessarily understand that their speech isn’t protected under the First Amendment. In some cases, the students said, perpetrators expressed surprised that authorities took the threat seriously.

“We have this phenomenon in America where we think we know what free speech is, but we really don't,” said Marisa Quezada, a research assistant on the project who studied sociology at Chapman. “You're inciting violence – that's not something that's covered under free speech. And to threaten a federal official, that's a federal crime.”