Learning from Failures in Threat Assessment: Eleven Questions and Not Enough Answers

• In Event: Individual-focused Approaches to Crime Prevention

Abstract

Threat assessment theory and practice have evolved significantly over the last eighteen years since Columbine. The U.S. Secret Service’s guidelines for threat assessment provides school officials with information and strategies for identifying, evaluating, and managing students of concern (Fein, et al., 2002). The guidelines include eleven questions to use in a threat assessment, and these questions have laid the groundwork for how school officials investigate and evaluate threats. Yet, no research examines how school officials perceive and apply these questions. Understanding how school officials apply the questions proves critical to understanding the utility of the questions, as well as to identifying any gaps in the process. This qualitative case study seeks to examine the way school officials used those questions with a Colorado high school student, who underwent a threat assessment in September 2013 and then shot and killed a classmate and himself on school grounds in December 2013. The findings reveal the challenges with the application of the questions, capture the difficulties with gathering the data to answer those questions, and provide critical lessons learned for violence prevention in schools. Policy implications are discussed.

Authors

• Sarah Goodrum, University of Northern Colorado

• William Woodward, University of Colorado Boulder