By Brian A. Jackson, Pauline Moore, Jennifer T. Leschitz, Benjamin Boudreaux, Jo Caulkins, Shoshana R. Shelton

Violence by K–12 students is disturbingly common. Ensuring that schools have effective ways to identify and prevent such incidents is becoming increasingly important. Various concerning behaviors or disturbing communications, including direct threats, can precede acts of violence. Although removing every student exhibiting such behaviors might seem prudent, doing so can be counterproductive, limiting the effectiveness of safety efforts. With effective systems for behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM), schools can assess and respond to concerning behavior to protect the community and respond to the student whose behavior caused concern.

To do so, schools need the tools to respond. Tools may include restrictive measures or law enforcement involvement in the most serious cases, but other options can be more effective. Those additional options include different types of mental health intervention, counseling, and other supports. Teams with extensive tools available to them can better customize interventions, increasing the chance of positive outcomes for all involved.

In this report, the authors draw on published literature and extensive interviews with education and public safety practitioners to build an inventory of the many intervention options that are valuable for schools in the management phase of BTAM. In addition, drawing on varied approaches from the fields of counseling, school discipline and behavioral management, and other professions that must match appropriate services to the needs of youth in their care, the report discusses decision support tools to help management teams implement this critical part of efforts in preventing targeted violence and keeping school communities safe.

Key Findings

Various Intervention Options Are Available for K–12 BTAM Efforts

Support-focused interventions can address the underlying causes of problematic student behavior and also lead a student toward a more favorable, positive path into the future.

By using supportive counseling and other interventions, BTAM is widening the options available for school leaders and staff to address problematic behavior that has the potential to develop into violence.

To be effective, school BTAM teams need a broad set of tools, including options appropriately matched (1) to the specifics of a student's problematic behaviors, (2) to the unique school community and environment, and (3) to the needs and circumstances of the student or students involved.

Insights from Education, Public Safety, and Other Fields Can Be Combined to Support Matching Effective Interventions to Student Needs

Decision support tools and resource-matching guidance can help ensure that school-based teams are collecting the information required to taking a holistic approach to address a student's varied needs and help promote appropriate consistency to ensure that disparities in how BTAM teams respond do not substantiate concerns that BTAM processes are unfair or inequitable.

Using structured systems to capture data when a BTAM team (1) interviews students involved in an incident, (2) collects school or law enforcement data, or (3) contacts others for information about a student of concern provides a more straightforward starting point for selecting among multiple intervention options.

Recommendations

To better inform intervention planning, intervention tools should be designed so that they prioritize collecting data on factors that can be changed because pieces of information in BTAM that may be a useful part of assessing the danger posed by an individual may be useless for intervention planning.

The inventory of intervention options developed in this study could provide a starting point for schools to make conscious decisions as they (1) review the options available to their teams and (2) identify any options they do not have access to but that could become valuable near-term priorities to strengthen their school safety efforts.

Progress monitoring data of BTAM efforts can help better support students while also helping schools become more responsive to external oversight of their BTAM programs and allay concerns about the fairness and equity of outcomes across different student populations.

Including positive mileposts into threat management planning not only could help lay out a path to full completion of all intervention activities but could also help define goals more specifically for an at-risk student, motivating even more beneficial outcomes.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2025.

By: U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center

Preventing targeted violence in America is everyone's responsibility. 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. Unfortunately, many communities lack the structured systems to receive, evaluate, and respond to these reports in a way that reduces the likelihood of a violent outcome. The framework presented herein is the latest NTAC [National Threat Assessment Center] offering intended to support the violence prevention efforts of state and local law enforcement agencies. The steps that follow describe how agencies can adopt the principles of the Secret Service model to proactively identify and intervene with those who intend to carry out acts of targeted violence in their communities. These steps are not intended to be prescriptive, but rather offer a scalable blueprint that can be implemented by agencies varying in size, structure, and resources, all of which share the Secret Service's mission of preventing targeted violence.

United States. Secret Service. National Threat Assessment Center, Oct. 2024

GUNARATNA, ROHAN

From the document: "In 2024, the Israel-Hamas conflict will emerge as the preeminent threat to global security. An escalation of the conflict could spark a regional war and lead to a global recession. The West's support for Israel will fuel protests in the Muslim world, drive radicalisation and bring about terrorist attacks. Sunni and Shia groups will pose a common threat to western, Israeli and Jewish interests. Preventing the conflict from escalating and working towards a sustainable solution for the Palestinian people will require visionary leadership."

NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY. .30 MAY, 2024.

United States. Drug Enforcement Administration

From the document: "The 2024 NDTA [National Drug Threat Assessment] highlights the dangerous shift from plant-based drugs to synthetic drugs. This shift has resulted in the most dangerous and deadly drug crisis the United States has ever faced. These synthetic drugs, such as fentanyl and methamphetamine, are responsible for nearly all of the fatal drug poisonings in our nation. The Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels are at the heart of this crisis. These two Cartels are global criminal enterprises that have developed global supply chain networks. They rely on chemical companies and pill press companies in China to supply the precursor chemicals and pill presses needed to manufacture the drugs. They operate clandestine labs in Mexico where they manufacture these drugs, and then utilize their vast distribution networks to transport the drugs into the United States. They rely on associates in the United States to distribute the drugs at a retail level on the streets and on social media. Finally, the Cartels utilize Chinese Money Laundering Organizations to move their profits from the United States back to Mexico. Drug trafficking organizations based in Mexico and South America are increasingly utilizing China based underground banking systems as their primary money laundering mechanism. In response to these threats, the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] has acted urgently to target the criminal networks responsible for the influx of synthetic drugs into the United States."

United States. Drug Enforcement Administration. 2024. 57p

By John S. Hollywood, Keith Gierlack, Pauline Moore, Thomas Edward Goode, Henry H. Willis, Devon Hill, Rahim Ali, Annie Brothers, Ryan Bauer, Jonathan Tran

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security requires research and development to assess methods for reducing the propensity and loss of life from attacks on soft targets and crowded places (ST-CPs). Researchers conducted a comprehensive landscape assessment of the threat to ST-CPs and corresponding security measures to identify needs for improvement, and they recommended research and investment priorities for addressing those needs. 

The number of attack plots is broadly aligned with regional population counts, except that there were more plots in New York City and Washington, D.C. The most-common motivations for ST-CP attacks have been personal, followed by terrorist and racial and ethnic extremist motivations. The ST-CP locations targeted have been diverse and often directly accessible. Education and private buildings (workplaces) are the most–frequently targeted types of ST-CPs. In general, locations in which a would-be attacker had ready access to a dense crowd on scene had the highest average lethality (close to six deaths, on average, as compared with fewer than three when there was not a dense crowd present). Not surprisingly, locations that typically have large crowds without controlled entries, such as houses of worship, shopping malls, restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, had the highest average lethality.

RAND Corporation, Mar 27, 2024, 148 pages

United States. Department Of Homeland Security. Office Of Intelligence And Analysis

From the document: "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Intelligence Enterprise Homeland Threat Assessment reflects the insights from across the Department, the Intelligence Community, and other critical homeland security stakeholders. It focuses on the most direct, pressing threats to our Homeland during the next year and is organized into four sections. We organized this assessment around the Department's missions that most closely align or apply to these threats--public safety, border and immigration, critical infrastructure, and economic security. As such, many of the threat actors and their efforts cut across mission areas and interact in complex and, at times, reinforcing ways. Going forward, the annual Homeland Threat Assessment will serve as the primary regular mechanism for articulating and describing the prevailing terrorism threat level, which has previously been done through our issuance of National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) bulletins. In the future, the issuance of NTAS bulletins will be reserved for situations where we need to alert the public about a specific or imminent terrorist threat or about a change in the terrorism threat level."

Washington. D.D. United States. Department Of Homeland Security. Office Of Intelligence And Analysis. 2023..