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Threats, Harassment Of Government Officials Rising

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Colorado Supreme Court Justice Melissa Hart was playing Scrabble with her mother last December when police burst into her Denver home. With guns drawn, officers ordered the women out of the house while they searched the property. Someone had made a false call claiming a violent incident was under way in order to draw a SWAT team to her address. Days earlier, Hart had joined her court’s 4-3 majority finding Donald Trump ineligible for the presidency for engaging in insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Now she was the victim of “swatting.” 

“It was terrifying. I didn’t understand what was happening,” Hart said. In a nation where political discourse has reached a boiling point, violence spurred by ideology increasingly is the byproduct, reports the Wall Street Journal. Trump himself was the target of two apparent assassination attempts in the last two months.


Across the country, officials at all levels of government are facing harassment and threats from perpetrators who view public servants and politicians as an obstacle to imposing their own worldview. On Thursday, an Alaska man was charged with sending 465 threatening messages through the U.S. Supreme Court’s website targeting the six conservative justices and some of their family members over decisions he disagreed with. Last month, a California man was arrested after sending an Instagram message to a Democratic Florida state lawmaker saying he would “bring a gun to ur office tomorrow and shoot u and ur staff.” At no time since the tumultuous 1960s and early ’70s have American public officials been so under siege, academics who study political violence say. Threats against federal judges have doubled in three years, says the U.S. Marshals Service. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated 8,008 threat cases against members of Congress and their offices last year, a 54% increase since 2018. The threats are on pace to exceed that figure this year. As politically motivated attacks have proliferated, Americans have become more open to violence as a means to a political end, said Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. 

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A daily report co-sponsored by Arizona State University, Criminal Justice Journalists, and the National Criminal Justice Association

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