BTAM: Cooperation, Not Coercion

In July 2018, the US Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) released guidelines to help schools create a targeted violence prevention plan. The report, Enhancing School Safety Using a Threat Assessment Model: An Operational Guide for Preventing Targeted School Violence, notes that “the vast majority of incidents or concerns that are likely to be reported can be handled by school personnel using school or community resources” and identifies eight key steps for creating a comprehensive targeted violence prevention plan. The fourth step of NTAC’s guide is to establish a threshold for law enforcement involvement, which both implies and assumes that the process is being led by the school and not by the police.

Having the process led by schools makes sense because most of the cases for which behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM) is initiated occur in the pre-criminal space, where the at-risk individual has not yet engaged in an activity or behavior that allows for criminal charges to be filed. BTAM in such cases is focused on early threat identification, support for at-risk youth, and collaboration between community stakeholders and concerned family members. In its best incarnations, BTAM is a fundamentally cooperative endeavor, even if a degree of coercion is required.