BTAM: The Interagency Approach

In 2024, the US Secret Service published Behavioral Threat Assessment Units: A Guide for State and Local Law Enforcement to Prevent Targeted Violence to provide guidance to communities seeking to prevent terrorism and targeted violence. The guide identified two organizational approaches to implementing community-level behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM). DHS Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) defines BTAM as an evidence-based and systematic process to identify, inquire, assess, and manage potential threats capabilities: (1) a sole-management model and (2) an interagency model.

 A sole-management model consolidates services and control under a single agency. An interagency model, by contrast, follows many of the same threat assessment principles while also enabling collaboration and resource sharing through partnerships. However, understanding what an interagency approach looks like in practice can be difficult. CNA’s evaluation of the Wood County Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services (WCADAMHS) Board Ohio Behavioral Intervention Program provides an opportunity to explore a highly complex interagency network consisting of a community of practitioners with unique areas of expertise contributing to a multidisciplinary and collaborative solution.

As part of the evaluation, CNA conducted 27 interviews with professionals working in the Wood County network. Through the relationships identified in these interviews, we were able to map the interactions among the various organizations in the network.

We were also able to map the core network’s engagement with a vast number of supporting peripheral partners.

Although it is easy to underestimate the complexity of interactions within a single jurisdiction, Figures 1 and 2 make clear that the Wood County network is complex and layered. At the county level, network partners include the WCADAMHS Board, several community mental health organizations, a community services agency, public schools, juvenile detention facilities, the juvenile court, and the Wood County chapter of a national nonprofit mental health organization. State-level partners include a public safety organization, a hospital outside of Wood County, Ohio Homeland Security, and the Ohio Department of Health. At the national level, partners include the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Sandy Hook Promise (a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing gun violence), and a technology company working on a data-sharing solution for practitioners.

Far from relying on a sole managing entity, the participants in the network leveraged existing local resources and relationships (and built new ones) to strengthen the community’s targeted violence prevention capabilities. Although there are multiple ways to assess the role of an organization in a network, we chose to focus on two features. First, we used a measure of how well-connected an organization is to other well-connected organizations to identify leaders in the network. Second, we looked at each organization’s number of connections to other organizations to identify local hubs in the network. Both measures are important to consider; the first pinpoints leaders in the network as a whole, while the second locates local hubs. As illustrated in Table 1, the WCADAMHS Board is both the most influential and the most connected organization in the network. However, both School #1 and the DHS Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships are also among the top five most influential and connected organizations in the network.