SAN DIEGO — The threat of violence is a danger San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan knows all too well.
She said not only has she gotten personal threats, but her office works to prosecute harmful threats made against other elected officials.
“It’s not a one-time thing, they are receiving threats on a monthly basis,” Stephan said. “For some of us, it’s on a daily basis or a minute-by-minute basis.”
Stephan said that throughout her years of service in the District Attorney’s Office, she’s watched violent domestic threats escalate from people with radical views on both sides of the spectrum, affecting how civil servants and elected officials live.
“A lot of the expressions are translating into really threatening expressions,” she said. “And they’re affecting everyone. We’ve never seen this before. No one should be afraid to serve in the United States of America.”
Carl Luna is the director of the Institute for Civil Civic Engagement, a partnership between the University of San Diego and the San Diego Community College District. The ICCE promotes civility in civic discourse by citizens and public officials.
Rachel Locke is the director of the Violence, Inequality and Power Lab at Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego. They seek to understand how inequalities of power shape the landscape of violence.
They conducted research throughout San Diego, Riverside and Imperial counties. They found that 75% of elected officials report being threatened and harassed.
“They’re not going well. They’ve been getting worse since the pandemic,” Luna said. “And even before that, they weren’t great, but people are beginning to think this is the new normal, and it’s causing large numbers of people to reconsider public life.”
“The most illuminating pieces of data that we discovered in both years of our work — or those that resonated the most with people who heard our work - was that these threats and harassment are essentially non-partisan,” Locke said. “There is not a great difference across partisan lines in terms of who is on the receiving end.”
Both Locke and Luna said tension has been building for decades, with the latest escalation exploding with the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on July 13.
Their research also found that half of all survey respondents considered leaving public service because of the threats and harassment they endured, with twice as many women who considered leaving.
“The violence we witnessed last weekend is an extreme example of a trend of violence toward elected officials that has been getting worse for years,” Locke said. “We tend to hear more about the most extreme cases or the cases that impact more high-profile individuals, but as we can see from our work in San Diego, this impacts nearly everyone at nearly all levels of government.”
Both researchers are hopeful the future will be more peaceful, and that their research can help find peaceful solutions, but believes it will take time to change.
“I wish I was more optimistic but it’s going to take until well after this election and the next election and maybe the one after that for us to get back to something a little less vitriolic,” he said. “Bad things happen and they aren’t supposed to define us; it’s what we do afterwards that defines us. And if we can step up and say let’s try to get a politics which actually makes people live better, then we’re doing better.”
“If our attention is now fully focused on the problem, it must also turn to solutions and how we work collectively at all levels to pull back on rhetoric that demonizes, that attacks or that gives space for violence,” Locke said. “Difference — even conflict — in democracy is expected. Violence is not and it is up to all of us to do something about it.”
Stephan said they are tracking repercussions from the violence in Pennsylvania to prevent any potential incidents from spreading into San Diego. She hopes the research can help lay the pathway to peace.
“We have not studied domestic terrorism and threats sufficiently. And without the data, you don’t know the size of the monster that you are trying to stop, to defeat, to change,” she said. “We can’t change the course until we know what we’re dealing with.”
Locke said many elected officials expressed gratitude and thanks for their work and feeling a sense of solidarity was extremely meaningful to many they spoke with.