Fact claims

For over 25 years, the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) has produced research examining all forms of targeted violence to advance the agency’s protective and investigative missions and to support the safety and security of the broader homeland.

This model for violence prevention is informed by decades of NTAC research, which continually finds that most individuals who engage in acts of targeted violence elicit concern in those around them prior to the attack.

NTAC was created in 1998 to provide guidance on threat assessment both within the Secret Service and to others with criminal justice and public safety responsibilities.

In 1902, Congress directed the Secret Service to assume full-time responsibility for protecting the President.

In the decades that followed, the agency’s capacity to identify and intervene with those who pose a risk of harm to a protected person became a central feature of its protective mission and came to be known within the Secret Service as Protective Intelligence.

Just as the Secret Service’s mission to prevent assassination using Protective Intelligence is longstanding, so is the agency’s interest in behavioral assessment as a field of scientific study, with the agency’s earliest behavioral science research commissioned in the 1960s.

To further understand the relationship between behavioral assessment and violence prevention, the Secret Service convened a conference in 1981 involving agency representatives and leading behavioral scientists from across the country. One of the resulting recommendations was that the Secret Service establish an internal behavioral science research capacity to continue advancing the agency’s ability to prevent violence.

Relatedly, participant feedback from a subsequent Secret Service conference on stalking behaviors encouraged the agency to conduct an in-depth examination of the most serious known cases of assassination.

These two events led to the Exceptional Case Study Project (ECSP), a research study initiated in 1992 that sought to provide operationally relevant information and guidance to law enforcement agencies and other organizations with protective responsibilities.

The ECSP coined the term targeted violence and established the foundational model of the Secret Service’s behavioral threat assessment approach, which is still in use today.

In 1998, the Secret Service established the National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) to produce research and provide training and consultation on behavioral threat assessment to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.

As part of its congressionally mandated mission, NTAC produces groundbreaking operational research studies examining targeted violence in a variety of settings and publishes best practice guidance for public safety partners entrusted with ensuring the safety of our communities.

NTAC staff also deliver training by request to tens of thousands of public safety officials every year and routinely consult with a variety of agencies and organizations that are developing their own threat assessment capacities.

In addition to aiding external partners with violence prevention efforts, research produced by NTAC continues to shape the Protective Intelligence methodology used by the Secret Service.

Far too often, communities have witnessed mass injury and loss of life at the hands of an attacker, only to learn that the perpetrator had a long history of threatening or concerning behaviors.

In many cases, the attacker’s behavior was witnessed by community bystanders, some of whom sought to report their concerns to public safety officials.

Over 25 years of NTAC research on targeted violence has continued to reinforce that: • There is no specific demographic profile of an attacker.

Those who pose a risk of violence do not always make direct threats prior to an attack but often communicate their intentions to those around them.

Attackers often elicit concern from those around them because of their behaviors or communications.

Bystander reporting and intervention can avert planned acts of targeted violence.

The Secret Service originally developed behavioral threat assessment to prevent assassinations and safeguard the nation’s leaders.

The Secret Service model has since been adapted to prevent all forms of targeted violence impacting communities in America, including acts of workplace violence, K–12 school shootings, terrorism, and mass attacks in public spaces.

As public entities, state and local law enforcement agencies across the United States draw their police powers from local ordinances and state statutes, which generally grant them the authority to detect and prevent crime, to safeguard life and property, and to preserve the peace.

BTAUs have been developed by state law enforcement agencies and within fusion centers across the country.

The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (NCSBI), for example, chose to establish its Behavioral Threat Assessment Unit, known as the BeTA Unit, as a part of the North Carolina Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAAC) with the goal of taking a proactive approach to violence prevention.

Other examples include the Hawai’i State Fusion Center (HSFC), which supports Threat Team Hawai’i (TTH), a multidisciplinary team that identifies, assesses, and manages situations where the risk of targeted violence is imminent and/or anticipated.

Similarly, in the nation’s capital, the DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (HSEMA) established a behavioral threat assessment and management program as a part of the DC Fusion Center.

For example, in July of 1990, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) established the Threat Management Unit (TMU) due to a disturbing increase in obsessive, fixated, and sometimes violent behavior directed at high-profile public figures.

The TMU was initially created to facilitate direct reporting of and a timely response to the stalking behaviors of those who persistently attempted to contact area celebrities.

The LAPD determined there was a need to develop a specialized unit capable of providing nontraditional law enforcement services to intervene and manage individuals of concern before the potential for violence escalated further.

Today, the TMU is responsible for investigating and providing early intervention for aggravated stalking cases, criminal threat cases directed at elected city officials, and workplace violence cases involving city employees and departments, with the overall aim of managing cases before violence occurs.

The TMU also staffs the Los Angeles City Threat Assessment Team and liaises to maintain relationships with entertainment studios, the Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the California Highway Patrol’s Dignitary Protection Unit, and other similar units.

As another example, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO) in Florida established its Threat Management Division in 2021.

The Threat Management Division’s mission is to identify indicators of potential targeted violence as early as possible and to act before they become actual threats or result in violence.

In addition to its specific threat management functions, the 71-member division also houses the agency’s mental health unit, mass casualty planning unit, and intelligence lead policing section.

These units work in concert to prevent targeted violence by identifying, assessing, and managing individuals who have exhibited concerning behavior; providing field-based mental health services; assessing site safety at schools and other critical infrastructure; and conducting active assailant response training.

Public schools in Florida are mandated by law to have threat management programs, but PCSO also operates a dedicated school-based threat management program for private schools throughout Pinellas County.

PCSO has partnered with several multidisciplinary community entities, including community mental health providers, school district representatives, the local prosecutor’s office, and the state probation office, all of whom meet weekly to support open threat management cases.

For example, the Rochester Threat Advisory Committee (ROCTAC) is a behavioral threat assessment advisory team created to facilitate information sharing and coordinate threat management around Rochester, NY.

Participating agencies include federal, state, and local law enforcement and other government agencies, along with universities, K–12 schools, mental health professionals, houses of worship, corporations, and community outreach partners.

The advisory team meets regularly, and any participating member agency can present a case to the team. While all responsibilities associated with the case remain with the presenting agency, other agencies in the advisory group can make recommendations about possible intervention options and share resources when appropriate.

For example, at the time of this writing, the LAPD TMU was staffed with five case-carrying detectives and one officer-in-charge, an expansion from the TMU’s original structure of three detectives and one supervisor.

For example, at the time of this writing, the NCSBI BeTA Unit is staffed by eight law enforcement personnel (one assistant special agent in charge and seven special agents) one intelligence analyst, two psychologists, and one social worker.

At the time of this writing, there are grant programs at the state and federal levels created to support the establishment of BTAUs and related functions, including funds for behavioral threat assessment training and for the development of bystander reporting programs.

A distinguishing feature of the Secret Service’s behavioral threat assessment approach is that all cases are centrally administered by the Secret Service Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division (PID).

For instance, within the Secret Service, each case is centrally administered by special agents and intelligence analysts at Secret Service Headquarters in Washington, DC, while the investigative work for those cases is conducted by special agents in Secret Service Field Offices around the world, all of whom have been trained in behavioral threat assessment methodology.

In other words, Secret Service field agents routinely conduct interviews, review records, write reports, make assessments, and employ behavioral management strategies, while those processes are centrally coordinated, reviewed, and documented at Secret Service Headquarters.

The Secret Service receives information relevant to the agency’s protective mission from a variety of sources, including concerned bystanders, law enforcement agencies, and other organizations. Regardless of the source, all information with a Protective Intelligence nexus is collected and processed through a centralized operations center within the Secret Service.

For example, iWatchTexas is a public portal through which reports enter the Texas Suspicious Activity Reporting Network (TxSARNet) and the School Safety Network.

These statewide reporting networks help provide a holistic view of terrorism, crime, and school safety-related suspicious activity and concerns in the State of Texas.

Other states have bystander reporting systems designed specifically to support school safety, such as Safe2Tell Colorado.

In addition to receiving tips about potential school violence, programs like Safe2Tell also receive tips about other concerning behaviors involving students, such as bullying, drug use, depression, suicide, and self-harm, all of which have been observed as common precursors to school violence.

For example, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO) Threat Management Division has identified criteria for internal law enforcement reports to be automatically routed for review by PCSO analysts for possible threat management follow-up. These criteria include: • evidence of targeted/planned violence toward people or property; • direct or indirect threats of violence; • physical or verbal intimidation (e.g., bullying); • contextually inappropriate comments about harming others; • stalking; • arson; • animal cruelty; • fixation on mass murder, weapons, or violence; • fixation on hate groups, terrorist activity, or extremist material; • suicidal statements with an articulated plan and threats to others; • statements regarding revenge for perceived injury or grievance; • statements regarding a quest for justice; • statements regarding a desire for notoriety; and • statements regarding a desire to solve an unsolvable problem.

Often, communities in the United States identify warning signs for acts of targeted violence after violence has already taken place.

In some cases, attackers had demonstrated concerning behavior at home, at work, in school, and online, but no program existed to examine all those behaviors together.

Prior NTAC research has identified common motives for those who have planned or perpetrated acts of targeted violence.

For example, in a study examining mass attacks in public spaces, NTAC found that such attacks were most commonly motivated by grievances (e.g., personal, workplace, or domestic), ideologies/racial bias, symptoms of psychosis (e.g., paranoia or delusions), desire to kill, and seeking fame or notoriety.

NTAC research has shown that nearly three-quarters (73%) of mass attacks in the United States involved firearms, and over one-quarter (29%) of the attackers who used firearms met at least one criterion that federally prohibited them from purchasing or possessing a firearm.

NTAC research has found that many mass attacks in the United States involved a firearm that was illegally possessed at the time of the attack.

For example, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO) Threat Management Division conducts weekly meetings with outside agencies and organizations who have a role in their threat management process.

Weekly meetings are attended by representatives from groups including: • State Attorney’s Office (for adults), • State Attorney’s Office (for juveniles), • Mental Health Unit (law enforcement), • Crisis Response Specialist (mental health practitioner) , • Habitual Offender Monitoring Enforcement (HOME),

In nearly every averted school plot examined, tragedy was prevented by members of the community coming forward when they observed behaviors that elicited concern.

For this campaign, DHS creates and disseminates public outreach materials, co-brands materials with partners, releases public service announcements, and develops strategic partnerships with public and private organizations who help amplify the message in their communities.

When the public perceives law enforcement as fair, transparent, and respectful, they are more trusting of the process and more willing to offer information that could help.