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The plan was foreshadowed online. Photos of the Allen mall. Pictures of guns and receipts for tactical gear. Mass shootings described as “interesting,” “sport” and “art.”
It’s unclear whether the posts linked to the accused Allen mall shooter were visible to anyone but him before the attack. But even if they were, if no one reported the threats to authorities, experts say, it would have been nearly impossible for law enforcement to find them.
“It’s unrealistic for the public to think that any one service, database or agency could somehow track everything in real time. That only happens in the movies and on television,” said Katherine Schweit, a former FBI special agent and author of the book Stop the Killing: How to End the Mass Shooting Crisis.
“There is no master system that allows the federal government to scrape the internet,” she said.
The use of online platforms is one of the biggest challenges the FBI faces in countering violent extremism, an FBI spokesperson said in a statement to The Dallas Morning News.
“The widespread use of social media has increased the speed, dissemination, efficiency, and accessibility of violent extremist content, and also provides countless means of establishing connections among like-minded individuals,” the statement reads.
After the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the government tried to improve its ability to prevent mass attacks, investing millions of dollars and creating new ways for law enforcement agencies to share information.
But the job gets harder every year, and authorities know they can’t monitor the entirety of the world’s vast, ever-changing digital landscape. That means online traces predating violent acts, like the ones left behind by the Allen mall gunman, can easily go undetected.
The challenges expand from there, experts say. The First Amendment protects the hate speech and extremist writings that often precede a mass shooting.
Radical views, low profile
The 33-year-old Dallas man who authorities say fatally shot eight people and injured seven others had no documentable criminal history, Hank Sibley, the Texas Department of Public Safety’s North Texas regional director, said at a news conference this week.
He had no history of incarceration in the state, said Amanda Hernandez, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Police records show he had an active misdemeanor warrant for drug paraphernalia in Garland from 2020.
Still, the warning signs were plentiful: disturbing messages praising other mass shootings and racist images contained within more than 160 posts and 1,100 photos. But they were hard to find, hosted on a Russian social media site that resembles Facebook. And the gunman didn’t seem to be tied to any organization.
“To catch somebody like [the Allen gunman] is really difficult,” said William Pelfrey Jr., a professor of criminal justice at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. “He wasn’t participating in social media around a specific theme. And his posts had pretty low visibility.”
The gunman seemed to exist in anonymity and isolation, which makes it difficult for any law enforcement agency to find or track him, Pelfrey said.
“He seemed to resemble other mass shooters having strongly held ideas that allowed him to minimize the value of life and subsequently rationalize violent behavior,” he said. “That’s a theme among people who are violent or engage in mass events.”
Both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are aware of this trend.
The FBI gathers and analyzes intelligence to determine whether individuals are a threat and encourages the public to immediately report any suspicious activity, according to the agency’s statement.
“The FBI investigates individuals who commit or intend to commit violence and criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security,” the statement read. “We are committed to upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans and may not open an investigation based solely on First Amendment activity.”
Hateful writings that have preceded mass shootings, including manifestos from domestic terrorists such as the man who carried out a racially motivated attack on an El Paso Walmart in 2019, remain protected under the Constitution.
Law enforcement can’t make an arrest “just because somebody is espousing hate,” Schweit said. “You have a First Amendment right to hate whoever you want. You just can’t hurt them.”
State and federal law enforcement are limited by the absence of a criminal charge for domestic terrorism, which makes it harder to investigate and track trends, according to a Texas DPS threat assessment issued in 2020. Many domestic terrorists caught before an attack are charged with weapons, fraud and drug charges not explicitly connected to terrorism, the DPS report said.
Thomas D. Petrowski, a visiting assistant professor of criminology at Tarleton State University who had a 23-year career with the FBI, said “the fantasy that there is a secret AI algorithm searching for buzzwords” is not true. The FBI requires a strong rationale before investigating a person, he explained.
Hints of violence to come
In the case of mass shootings, experts use the term “leakage” to refer to social media posts that give signs of the planned shooting. In about 45% of cases, such clear indicators are given by an active shooter before they actually act, Petrowski said.
“Some of them are documenting every step because it’s a form of suicide,” he said.
The Allen shooter is not the first to have documented a plan online in addition to posting about white superiority and Nazi ideology. The man charged with capital murder in the El Paso Walmart attack in 2019 posted a manifesto embracing a racist theory that non-white immigrants are replacing white Americans.
The El Paso attack is one of several recent mass shootings in Texas that is considered domestic terrorism, an attack committed as part of an ideology or cause or social goals of individuals based in the U.S.
DPS also considers the 2016 killing of Dallas police officers as a racially motivated act of domestic terror.
President Joe Biden, soon after taking office in 2021, directed his national security team to work on a new plan to counter domestic terrorism.
The strategy includes sharing information among governmental and law enforcement agencies and deterring activity related to domestic terrorism.
The administration allocated over $100 million for the Department of Justice, FBI and Department of Homeland Security. The United States also joined an international partnership to eliminate terrorist content online.
In 2020, the Texas Department of Public Safety published a report assessing the threat of “mass attacks” in the state. The report states that “racially motivated attacks are currently the most violently active type of Domestic Terrorism within the United States and Texas” and “Domestic Terrorists and Homegrown Violent Extremists are using operationally secure social media platforms to radicalize and mobilize to conduct mass attacks with limited advance warning to law enforcement.”
Schweit, the former FBI special agent, said “the social media world is just part of concerning behavior. We might not see what’s going on online, but we see those around us.”
She explained that the bureau has studied past shooters and learned that for every shooter, at least four concerning behaviors had been observed before the shooting by at least one person.
Concerning behavior includes struggles with mental health, interpersonal interactions, or work or school performance. It could also include anger, physical aggression, violent media usage and impulsivity.
“They’re sad, lonely, troubled, individuals who have made decisions to reject society and blame everybody else,” Schweit said.
The Allen shooter shared many traits with mass shooters in Texas and beyond.
His social media posts showed a man obsessed with “my whiteness,” despite having a Spanish last name and brown skin. He referenced the culture of “incels” — the so-called involuntarily celibate who blame women and society when men fail to develop sexual relationships.
Racially motivated attacks by people espousing white superiority are a top category of domestic terror concern listed in the 2020 DPS threat assessment; incel ideology is listed as a growing threat. The average age of mass shooters in Texas was 30, according to the report.
The assessment also noted how, nationwide, almost half of mass shooters have targeted commercial areas with high pedestrian traffic.
DPS officials, who are overseeing the Allen investigation, have yet to name a motive for the shooter, though Sibley, the DPS regional director, said at a news conference Tuesday that the gunman expressed “neo-Nazi ideations” and adorned himself in insignia of extremists and white supremacists, which were reflected in patches and tattoos.
Investigators stopped short of declaring the attack as racially motivated — despite his writings online — and this week said it was too early to declare it domestic terrorism.
The shooter appeared to target “the location, rather than a specific group of people. He was very random in the people he killed,” Sibley said at the news conference.
When people post such threats online they either want validation or they want to be stopped, said Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government.
But posting on obscure, lesser known social media platforms suggests a person doesn’t want to be stopped, she said.
Most people don’t report warning signs because they either think someone else has already reported or because they don’t want to be a “snitch,” Schildkraut added.
It’s not clear yet who knew about the Allen shooter’s extreme leanings.
And Schweit, the former FBI special agent, emphasized that many people don’t report when they witness concerning behavior.
But “‘See something, say something’ is still a good idea,” she added.