START researcher Joshua Freilich will come to campus to discuss the development of and findings from the United States Extremist Crime Database (ECDB), a large-scale data-collection effort that has built the first-of-its-kind relational database of crimes committed by far-right, al-Qaida directed and influenced, animal rights, and environmental rights extremists in the United States reported in an open source.
In a Research Roundtable at 3:15 p.m. Thursday, March 22 in Symons Hall Rm. 3121, Freilich will discuss how the research team built the ECDB and findings from it, specifically focusing on attacks on police and lone wolf strikes. The ECDB has documented over 335 homicide events, claiming over 560 lives, committed by domestic far-right extremists between 1990 and 2010.
Freilich is the acting director of the Criminal Justice Ph.D. program and a member of the Criminal Justice Department at John Jay College, the City University of New York. He is also a member of the Terrorism Research and Analysis Project (TRAP), which is sponsored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) and a member of the Global Terrorism Database's (GTD) Advisory Board.
Freilich's research focuses on causes of and responses to terrorism as well as criminological theory. His research has been funded by DHS directly as well as through START. Freilich is currently the principal investigator, along with Steven Chermak, on the ECDB.