Comparing Individuals Who Engage in Violent Extremism and Similar Acts: What Research Sponsored by the National Institute of Justice Tells Us

Over the years, the National Institute of Justice’s (NIJ) funding for research has provided important opportunities to advance our understanding of topics related to crime and justice within the United States. Drawing from this portfolio, this synthesis paper compares and contrasts the data and findings from NIJ-sponsored research projects on violent extremism, mass shootings, and bias crimes. This comparison focuses both on the content of the data and on the creation and coverage of the data, examining findings from four research projects: The Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) database of 2,226 individuals who demonstrated at least 1 of 5 extremist or radicalized behaviors; The Bias Incidents and Actors Study (BIAS) database of 966 adults arrested or indicted for bias crimes; The National Hate Crime Investigation Study (NHCIS) database of 1,230 hate crime cases; The Violence Project dataset of 172 mass shootings.