This past weekend’s attacks targeting two Minnesota state lawmakers marks a deadly escalation of political violence in the United States and comes during a period of elevated threats against public officials at all levels of government.
At the federal level, U.S. Capitol Police have documented a spike in threats against members of Congress, with 2024 seeing the highest number of incidents since 2021 – the year of the January 6th attack. Already in 2025, federal judges have reported an “unprecedented” number of threatening messages and called for heightened security measures to protect themselves and their families. State-level data collected by the Brennan Center for Justice indicates that the frequency and seriousness of hostility toward state legislators have increased apace.
This climate of hostility has also become increasingly normalized at the local level. Our team at Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI), a research group that works to track and mitigate the risk of political violence in the United States, collected data on more than 600 threat and harassment incidents targeting local officials around the country last year alone. The data show that in 2024 there was a 14 percent increase in such incidents compared to 2023 and a 74 percent increase from 2022. Threatening and harassing events targeting local officials have continued at a high level this year. Including preliminary data for May, BDI has recorded over 200 incidents across 40 states so far in 2025.
Chilling Effects on Local Democracy
The impact of this growing political hostility is clear.
Our research finds that high-profile attacks on political figures have coincided with heightened fears among public officials at large, negatively impacting their willingness to engage in political activities. For example, local elected officials surveyed by BDI and CivicPulse in the aftermath of the 2024 assassination attempts targeting President Donald Trump reported a significant increase in levels of worry about hostility, which is linked to reduced willingness to run for re-election, work on controversial topics, or participate in public events. Some officials tell us that they are reconsidering public service altogether due to safety concerns.
Against this backdrop, threats can also have negative consequences for political activity that are comparable to physical acts of violence, enabling conflict actors to achieve their goals with methods that afford anonymity — like social media — and create additional challenges for legal accountability.
Left unchecked, this climate of hostility will continue to pose a significant danger to community safety and the health of America’s democracy.
Resilience in the Face of Hostility
However, there are steps communities and civil servants can take to counter the rising threat of political violence.
For starters, people often overestimate partisan support for violence, while underestimating support for collaboration across differences. BDI-CivicPulse survey research over the last two years shows that experiences of threats and harassment among local elected officials largely cut across party lines — a finding that can create new opportunities for cross-partisan action to counter hostility.
Local officials consistently tell us that open support from their communities and explicit condemnation of threats — especially from colleagues across the political aisle — are among the most important initial responses to an emerging incident. It is also a direct first step that all people can take when confronted with violent rhetoric and dehumanizing attacks. Americans do not have to accept this climate as the new normal, but they must stand up and reject it with a unified voice.
Short-Term Mitigation Steps
Local officials are also building their own frameworks to manage hostility, foster constructive dialogue, and promote community safety. Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than 200 officeholders to date, our research has identified a wide array of effective risk mitigation approaches local leaders are using to respond to threats and harassment.
Over 50 percent of the officials we interviewed said that they have already implemented individual safety precautions to tackle immediate risk factors that are within their control, including upgrading security for their homes, registering their office with a P.O. box to safeguard their home address, limiting personal social media use, boosting privacy protections online, and coordinating home “drive-bys” with local law enforcement at times of heightened concern. Court documents indicate that the perpetrator in Minnesota may have used data brokers and “people search” sites to identify the home addresses of his targets. Increasing access to online privacy and anti-doxing tools for officials, alongside broader efforts to regulate the data broker industry, can help reduce these risks in the short term.
At the same time, unlike federal officials — who are permitted by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to use campaign funds to pay for security measures related to their candidacy or service — many state and local officials lack the financial resources to level up their physical and digital security. State policy makers looking for a clear next step to bolster the safety of local officials in the aftermath of the Minnesota attacks can follow the FEC’s lead and expand access to security funding for local candidates and officeholders, accompanied by accessible guidelines on best practices and anti-corruption guardrails. These measures can provide an immediate and flexible tool for officials facing escalating threats, ensuring that personal safety is not dependent on personal wealth.
Medium-Term Support and Capacity-Building
In addition to security assistance, the officials we interviewed have highlighted multiple areas where government, civil society, community leaders, and other stakeholders can take action to fill safety gaps and build response capacity over the medium term. Such steps include investing in structured support systems like peer-to-peer networks, expanding threat management training for city attorneys and law enforcement, and providing greater access to mental health, de-escalation, and community safety resources — particularly for officials in rural or under-resourced areas.
Many officials have also specifically cited unclear frameworks for identifying and elevating credible threats across different jurisdictions as barriers to effective risk mitigation. National, state, and local initiatives to clarify the types of hostility that meet the threshold for legal or law enforcement action, and provide guidance on alternative approaches for edge cases that are “lawful, but awful,” are critical for reducing levels of worry among officials and increasing preparedness for moments of crisis.
Still, while legal and security approaches are often necessary elements of a response plan — or in some cases the last line of defense — they may not be a sufficient or appropriate answer in all contexts. Moreover, these approaches typically only address the symptoms of our metastasizing hostile climate — not the root cause. Countering the normalization of threats and political violence over the longer term will require broader, whole-of-society solutions.
Sustained Monitoring to Inform Long-Term Solutions
At a time when the federal government is dismantling programs designed to monitor targeted violence, and cutting funding for research into threat trends, how can policy makers accurately assess the current risk environment and design data-driven interventions that will make real change? A comprehensive, evidence-based picture of the threat landscape is essential for not only ensuring that funds for short-term mitigation steps (such as improved personal security) are administered effectively, but also for managing the most harmful consequences of our national condition. It is key to finding a cure for the underlying disease.
Like medicine, long-term solutions to hostility and political violence will require sustained investment in data collection and an information-sharing infrastructure to systematically track the problem and its impacts, allowing decision-makers to better understand emerging risks, strategically allocate resources, and evaluate the effects of new policies.
In this context, independent third-party research projects that can be made widely accessible to officeholders, law enforcement, and civil society — such as BDI’s publicly available database powered by a consortium of data-sharing partners — can begin to fill the gap. This type of structured, collaborative, and proactive monitoring approach — one that also captures the experiences of staff and family members affected by hostility — can provide a centralized repository of information on risks and needs, without forcing officials to track their own experiences. Independent open-access structures can also reduce reliance on law enforcement when relationships between officeholders and police may be strained, especially for officials who work on criminal justice policy or have advocated for police reform. As the federal government steps back, state and local governments can work together with research and community partners to step in, overcoming siloed data streams and diversifying support to secure consistent threat monitoring as a public good for the future.
The Minnesota attacks make it clear that the United States is at a pivotal juncture for its democracy. Americans can acquiesce to threats and violence as an inevitable part of the political system, or they can take the necessary steps to reverse course. These steps are not a mystery: targeted officials are telling us what local communities and governments can do to support them. Effective interventions to meet their urgent safety needs in the short term, coupled with sustained threat monitoring systems to inform holistic policy solutions over the long term, can help break the cycle of hostility and protect civic space.
The horrific events in Minnesota provide another wake-up call. It is up to Americans to listen – and act.
The post After the Minnesota Attacks: How Communities Can Respond to the Climate of Hostility Facing Public Officials appeared first on Just Security.