DOI: 10.3886/icpsr06007
title: Mentally Disordered Offenders in Pursuit of Celebrities and Politicians
title: Archival Version

description: These data were collected to develop a means of identifying those individuals most likely to be dangerous to others because of their pursuit of public figures. Another objective of the study was to gather detailed quantitative information on harassing and threatening communications to public figures and to determine what aspects of written communications are predictive of future behavior. Based on the fact that each attack by a mentally disordered person in which an American public figure was wounded had occurred in connection with a physical approach within 100 yards, the investigators reasoned that accurate predictions of such physical approaches could serve as proxies for the less feasible task of accurate prediction of attacks. The investigators used information from case files of subjects who had pursued two groups of public figures, politicians and celebrities. The data were drawn from the records of the United States Capitol Police and a prominent Los Angeles-based security consulting firm, Gavin de Becker, Inc. Information was gathered from letters and other communications of the subjects, as well as any other sources available, such as police records or descriptions of what occurred during interviews. The data include demographic information such as sex, age, race, marital status, religion, and education, family history information, background information such as school and work records, military history, criminal history, number of communications made, number of threats made, information about subjects' physical appearance, psychological and emotional evaluations, information on travel/mobility patterns, and approaches made.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Standardized missing values..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS0: Study-Level Files 
 DS1: Sample Data From Gavin de Becker, Inc. and Capitol Police Files 
 DS2: Sample Data From Capitol Police Files
description: (1) The documentation for this data collection does not indicate the time period to which the data refer. In addition, users should note that according to the documentation the individuals described in the collection are not representative of any geographic area. (2) The codebook is provided by ICPSR as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file. The PDF file format was developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF reader software, such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Information on how to obtain a copy of the Acrobat Reader is provided on the ICPSR Web site.
description: Individuals who pursue public figures.
description: Only subjects who had written letters or mailed some other type of communication and had been on file for at least six months prior to the beginning of data compilation were included. The subjects were then classified as approach-positive or approach-negative according to six criteria. The investigators controlled for the number of communications in a file so that the approach-positive samples and the approach-negative samples had similar distributions of numbers of communications. Part 1 is a stratified sample, and Part 2 is nonstratified.