Threat assessment

This article is about the practice in criminal psychology, schools, and international security. For system weaknesses, see Vulnerability assessment. For general hazards, see Risk assessment.

Threat assessment is the practice of determining the credibility and seriousness of a potential threat, as well as the probability that the threat will become a reality. Threat assessment is separate to the more established practice of violence-risk assessment, which attempts to predict an individual's general capacity and tendency to react to situations violently. Instead, threat assessment aims to interrupt people on a pathway to commit "predatory or instrumental violence, the type of behavior associated with targeted attacks," according to J. Reid Meloy, PhD, co-editor of the International Handbook of Threat Assessment. "Predatory and affective violence are largely distinctive modes of violence."

Threat assessments are commonly conducted by government agencies such as FBI and CIA on a national security scale. However, many private companies can also offer threat assessment capabilities targeted towards the needs of individuals and businesses.

Components

Threat assessment involves several major components:

• Identification: Identifying threats to commit a potential unfavorable act. Authorities must also convey that tips will be dealt with carefully and responsibly; understanding that people who report threats may fear that they could wrongly implicate someone else, entangle themselves in trouble or both.
• Initial Assessment: Determining the seriousness of the threat. This could involve security professionals, school counselors, supervisors or human resources managers talking to the person of concern and his or her peers and supervisors, as well as looking to social media sites, to better assess whether or not the person is planning violence, as well as to assess the subject's current life situations.
• Case Management: Developing intervention plans to address the underlying issue, such as bullying, anxiety and/or depression, which mental health professionals are trained to handle. In the cases where the assessment reveals a true threat, law enforcement and other professionals develop a plan to disrupt the potential pathway to violence. In the short term, that could mean alerting potential victims and restraining the subject. In the long term, it means to redirect someone who might be on such a path.
• Follow-up Assessment and Safety Planning: Depending on the threat, explicit or implied, past history or current threats of violence, the person determining the viability of a threat needs to critically evaluate the ongoing nature of the threat by continuously looking at the Recency-Severity-Intensity-Frequency indicators of the threat by the subject.

Areas of need

Threat assessment is relevant to many businesses and other venues, including schools. Threat assessment professionals, who include psychologists and law enforcement agents, work to identify and help potential offenders, guiding students to overcome underlying sources of anger, hopelessness or despair. These feelings can increase a student's risk of suicide, alcohol and drug use, physical abuse, dropping out and criminal activity. Threat assessment also applies to risk management. Information security risk managers often perform a threat assessment before developing a plan to mitigate those threats.

Per a Senator King hearing in 2022, a top U.S. military officer was reprimanded by Senator King, the chairman of the committee, because the threat assessment surrounding the Russian conflict with Ukraine was not anywhere near the actual outcome. Senator King commented that additional arms could have been sent by the U.S. government more quickly to aid Ukraine defense if a more reliable assessment would have been performed.

Schools

Many U.S. states require schools have threat assessmentsincluding Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia, and Washington state, according to a 2023 EdWeek article citing Everytown an organization that advocates for firearm safety.

The 2023 article "A state mandated school threat assessment: Here's what it means for students" reviews the results of a study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice that analyzed 23,000 student threat assessment done in Florida in the 2021-2022 school year. As the most comprehensive study so far done by University of Virginia researchers, the article states the assessments done that year produced mixed results. The main takeaways are that better data needs to be gathered by both states and school districts to ensure fairness, that threat assessments need to be fully funded to offer support to struggling students, that sixty-four percent of the student threats studied were transient, and that Black students were disproportionately referred for threat assessments.

After the 2024 shooting in a Windor, Ga highschool resulted in four deaths, Education Week analyzed the subject in the article, "Why responding to student threats is so complicated." This case had reports to the FBI in 2023, but these reports did not lead to a conclusive identification of the then 13-year-old boy who about a year later used an AR-15 style gun at Apalachee High School.

The article looks at how there were many systems in play between the FBI Atlanta Field Office, the Jackson County Sheriff's Office that alerted that areas schools, and then the Barrow County School District that was next to Jackson County but it wasn't determined if they got the warning, and no threat assessment team was in place at the school where the shooting happened.

Federal data says for the 2023-2024 school year eighty-five percent of public schools have behavioral threat assessment teams or something similar. Issues arise with different state laws and wide variation in what practices they use (evidence based is oneknown as Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines ) as well as what is deemed a threat, according to the Ed Week article.

Another 2024 Ed Week article "How Columbine shaped 25 years of school safety" This article chronicles how threat assessments were recommended in the wake of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Co., but schools still struggle to get it right.

A 2022 New Yorker article "Can researchers show that threat assessment stops mass shootings" states that there isn’t definitive evidence that threat assessments stop school shootings. However, the upside of threat assessments can be a warmer school community when struggling students get support.

A California case that challenged the practice of threat assessments was the Taft Union case covered in the Psychology Today article "Threat Assessment Team Negligence: The Taft Union Case." This article outlines steps to avoid negligence in threat assessments based on a school shooting where in 2013 a student Brian O. came to first period with a shotgun that he fired and left a chest wound for one student and a near miss for another before Brian surrendered. He was criminally convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison.

The ensuing California Court of Appeals civil court case found in 2022 that there was 54 percent negligence with the threat assessment and management team and awarded $3.8 million for the plaintiff, Bowe Cleveland, who was shot in the chest.

There have been more incidents covered by the media where bias may have effected students lives when they were determined to be threats as shown in cbs8.com articles about the long-term stigma of falsely being determined a threat and a twelve-year-old being arrested and subsequently charged with a felony regarding his Snapchat message in San Diego, California.

There is also evidence that Black and Hispanic students are disproportionately determined threats as well as students with disabilities.

In the 2016 Oregonian/OregonLive article "Targeted: A Family and the Quest to Stop the Next School Shooter," a sixteen-year-old boy on the autism spectrum eventually drops out of school after being selected for a threat assessment. The family allowed the reporter full access to their experience of not being able to get information from the district and their son feeling singled out and criminalized. The "threat" was eventually determined to be a misunderstanding.

The book "Trigger Points" by Mark Follman (a Mother Jones national affairs editor) covers threat assessments and traces them to an awareness of stalking behavior after the murder of John Lennon and shooting of Ronald Reagan. Follman elaborates how the field of behavioral threat assessment first grew out of Secret Service and FBI serial-killer investigations. His thesis is that these assessments have the potential to stop school shootings.