Then and Now: Tracking a Federal Agency’s Threat Assessment Activity Through Two Decades With an Eye Toward the Future

The following is an edited summary of a plenary session provided by the speakers during the 25th Annual Conference of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP) Conference held August 2015. We are going to talk a little bit about history. We are sorry to bore you with this again but this is going to be about the history of the Capitol Police Threat Assessment Section. In 1987, the command made a decision to develop a threat assessment unit. We were trying to find out who actually made that command decision but nobody claimed it. We credit our Chief of Police at the time who was James Carvino. The Congress, the Senate, and the Capitol Police were not satisfied with the results that they were getting related to threats against Members of Congress. At that time, the USCP was in the process of starting a dignitary protection division for congressional leadership and so they needed a little bit of justification for spending the money. Like everything else back then, they did it in a really organized fashion as they brought two investigators and a Sergeant together and said, “Ok guys, you are going to take care of threats on Members of Congress.” We will tell you that there was not a lot of training on threat assessment and threat management back then...

Broadening campus threat assessment beyond mass shootings

Record reviews of public figure, primary/secondary school, and workplace threateners and attackers displayed the importance of noticing pre-incident behaviors and intervening to prevent violence. General crime prevention strategies did not appear applicable. Similarly, campus threat assessment research has considered targeted violence as distinctive and unable to be reviewed within general collegiate samples, which has related to questions about the prevalence, predictiveness, applicability, and reporting of pre-incident behaviors. This article applies general criminological and crime prevention findings to these questions and presents campus threat assessment methodologies informed by these fields. With college student surveys, pre-incident behaviors have appeared predictive of general physical assault, which promotes investigation of the generalizability of campus threat assessment across collegiate bullying, intimate partner, stalking, and workplace violence concerns. In college student surveys, the majority of observed pre-incident behavior has not been reported to campus authorities and has been impacted by students’ personal victimization, assessment of dangerousness, and relationship with the perpetrator. Efforts to enhance reporting in general criminological and crime prevention fields could be applied to improving pre-incident authority notification. Thus, viewing campus threat assessment within the broader violence prevention framework can advance the efficiency, effectiveness, and applicability of the approach

Threat Assessment and Management in Higher Education in the United States: A Review of the 10 Years Since the Mass Casualty Incident at Virginia Tech

Copyright © 2016 American Psychological Association. Used by permission

Campus Safety: Assessing and Managing Threats

Since the shootings at Virginia Tech, academic institutions and police departments have dedicated substantial resources to alleviating concerns regarding campus safety. The incident in Blacksburg and the similar tragedy at Northern Illinois University have brought renewed attention to the prevention of violence at colleges and universities. Campus professionals must assess the risk posed by known individuals, as well as by anonymous writers of threatening communications. The authors offer threat assessment and management strategies to address the increased demands faced by campus law enforcement, mental health, and administration officials who assess and manage threats, perhaps several simultaneously

Differentiating Sexual Offender Type on Measures of Impulsivity and Compulsivity

It is suspected that rapists, child molesters, and offenders with both child and adult victims (mixed offenders) may have different motivations and offending patterns—that they are heterogeneous. A central difference between these groups of offenders may be their propensity toward sexually impulsive behaviors and compulsive behavior. Analyses were conducted to assess the mean differences between the various offender types across four measures related to sensation seeking and compulsivity as well as several other proxy behavioral measures. Results suggest that there are differences in sexual impulsive and compulsive behavior among the different types of offenders. Treatment implications are discussed

Exposure to Pre-Incident Behavior and Reporting in College Students

Campus targeted violence is preceded by noticeable, alarming behavior, and reporting improvement efforts have been suggested to increase students’ willingness to inform campus authorities of forewarning actions. Reporting improvement techniques have been most successful with material appealing to the perceptions of high-risk students (i.e., those likely to observe and not report). The current study examined the characteristics of students that view threatening behavior and lack willingness to report with a large, Midwestern, undergraduate sample (n 450). Approximately 35% of the sample (i.e., n 157) indicated observing pre-incident behavior on campus, and 65% of these individuals (i.e., n 101) described unwillingness to inform police in the majority of hypothetical threatening situations. Males and students with self-reported delinquency exhibited greater unwillingness to report. Negative feelings toward campus police and high feelings of safety on campus corresponded with unwillingness to report. Students observing pre-incident behavior had more campus connectedness, negative views of campus police, and fewer feelings of safety on campus. Thus, reporting improvement efforts appears highly important to advancing the violence prevention abilities of campus threat assessment teams. Peer education could generate lasting attitudinal and behavioral change for high-risk students. These strategies could involve highly connected student leaders respected by males and students endorsing delinquency and material formatted in a nonconfrontational manner

Behavioral Science Guidelines for Assessing Insider Threats

This brochure presents a framework to view threats made by an insider that are targeted or intentional (as opposed to negligent or unintentional) and that involve some degree of deliberation (as opposed to those that may be considered impulsive). The framework was developed with the assumption that it must: Be applicable for both anonymous and known subjects Recognize interactions and patterns of behavior Allow for investigation with whatever information is immediately available Recognize that behaviors or warning activity may shift, decrease, or be emboldened by protective or organizational actions Insider attacks are often handled internal to an organization and are under-reported to law enforcement agencies. This has limited the sample of insider threats available for research in this area. Most of the available literature related to insider threats exists in areas outside of behavioral science. It is generally conceptual in nature rather than data driven and often focuses on threats to information systems. The field of threat assessment represents a blending of behavioral science, intelligence, and law enforcement strategies. It evolved from practices used to assess and manage dangerousness (potential risk for violence)

Behavioral Science Guidelines for Assessing Insider Threats

This brochure presents a framework to view threats made by an insider that are targeted or intentional (as opposed to negligent or unintentional) and that involve some degree of deliberation (as opposed to those that may be considered impulsive). The framework was developed with the assumption that it must: Be applicable for both anonymous and known subjects Recognize interactions and patterns of behavior Allow for investigation with whatever information is immediately available Recognize that behaviors or warning activity may shift, decrease, or be emboldened by protective or organizational actions Insider attacks are often handled internal to an organization and are under-reported to law enforcement agencies. This has limited the sample of insider threats available for research in this area. Most of the available literature related to insider threats exists in areas outside of behavioral science. It is generally conceptual in nature rather than data driven and often focuses on threats to information systems. The field of threat assessment represents a blending of behavioral science, intelligence, and law enforcement strategies. It evolved from practices used to assess and manage dangerousness (potential risk for violence)

Youthful Familicidal Offenders: Targeted Victims, Planned Attacks

A nonrandom national sample of 16 familicides, which involved 19 offenders (ages 14 to 21 years) who either killed or made a serious attempt to kill their families, was studied. The majority of offenders were Caucasian (78.91 %) males (84.21 %) with interpersonal family conflicts due to parental control, substance use, or physical violence. Prior to the murders, 50 % of the offenders reported to others their intent to kill their families. All of the 42 reported victims were specifically targeted and most of the homicides were planned shooting attacks (75 %) rather than spontaneous eruptions. Immediately following the homicides, 75 % of the offenders stole money from their families, and in 50 % of the cases they either called their friends to report the murders or to plan leisure activities. All offenders were immediate suspects and 81.25 % confessed to the homicides. Implications for furthering our understanding of this group of young offenders are offered

Quantum properties of optical field in photonic band gap structures.

A theoretical analysis of the quantum behaviour of radiation field's propagation in photonic band gaps structures is performed. In these initial calculations we consider linear inhomogeneous and nondispersive media