Over the past five years, from Charlottesville to Pittsburgh to El Paso, attacks by people who reject our multiracial democracy have shaken our country to its core and sparked conversation about how best to address far-right violence. The Trump administration, which stoked the flames of white supremacy, ended with the ransacking of the U.S. Capitol as Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. The Biden administration has now identified far-right violence as a rising threat and has sought to focus more resources and attention on addressing it. But the administration is adapting strategies developed as part of the war on terror that are ineffective and likely to harm the very communities of color that are so often the target of far-right violence.

This report proceeds in five parts. It first outlines how CP3’s activities build on CVE’s flawed premises that people take a definable path to violence, that there are identifiable risk factors that make them more disposed to going down this path, and that there are pre-attack indicators that can accurately identify them before they act. In part II, the report explains that expanding the scope of the CVE violence prevention approach does not address these critiques of CVE. DHS’s own sources make clear that there are important differences between terrorism and targeted violence, which itself sweeps in a diverse range of conduct. In part III, the report analyzes the empirical research underlying the risk factors and indicators the department promotes for identifying potentially violent actors. It shows that the research does not support the use of these markers in prevention programs. Part IV identifies the harms of CP3’s programs, which will be felt disparately by historically marginalized communities. It demonstrates that CP3’s blending of public safety and social service provisions undermines both goals; further, it shows that CP3 activities are likely to chill constitutionally protected expression and stigmatize those flagged as threats. The report recommends in part V that the social problems CP3 often identifies as threats to national security — poor economic opportunity or the need for mental health treatment, for example — be divorced from a security framework and untethered from law enforcement. Instead, efforts to relieve these problems should be managed by institutions with the relevant expertise and outlook, with allocation of resources to address them based on community needs rather than a perceived risk of terrorism.