Do You Know Enough About Campus Threat Assessment?

The shooting rampage at Virginia Tech in 2007 terrified the nation and became a game-changer for colleges and universities. Once considered a safe haven for learning, campuses came under attack for their wide-open spaces and lack of external controls. Administrators wondered: “Could my campus become the next target?"

One of the ways higher education has responded to the threat of man-made violence has been through the development of threat assessment teams charged with identifying, assessing, and defusing potentially harmful situations.

Are they getting it right? A nationally recognized expert offered best practices in threat assessment, and representatives from three universities described their approach to campus safety.

Building Solid Teams

Every college and university in the U.S. should have a threat assessment team or program, said Marisa Randazzo, director of threat assessment at Georgetown University and managing partner of Sigma Threat Management Associates in Alexandria, Va.

“The best recent estimate is that about 50 percent of colleges and universities have some threat assessment teams or folks trained in threat assessment,” she said. “A lot of colleges and universities develop a team but they don’t necessarily know what to do.”

Randazzo said effective threat assessment teams have five core components:

1. Multidisciplinary representation. “What makes threat assessment work well is when you can pull information together to get a full picture,” she said. A multidisciplinary team might include representatives from academics, student affairs, human resources, student conduct, residential life, police or public safety or campus security, local law enforcement, general counsel, the student counseling center, and the employee assistance program.

Multidisciplinary teams “can collect information faster and more efficiently if they are asking colleagues they already know about a situation or person. Most importantly, they will have better, faster access to a whole array of support and intervention resources,” she said.

“If you have a concern that someone is planning violence, we try to identify the underlying drivers, what grievance or problem they have, and how we can help them solve it through a nonviolent means,” said Randazzo, former chief research psychologist with the U.S. Secret Service. It is also important to monitor the person and make sure the underlying issue is resolved.

2. Best practices training. “If threat assessment team members don’t receive appropriate training, they often resort to what they do in their own silos,” Randazzo said. “The police arrest, and the counselor counsels.” Train team members together to improve consensus-based decision making and information processing.

3. An appropriate level of authority. An email to team members from the college president stating, “We’re asking you to engage in threat assessment on behalf of the institution,” can thwart challenges to the team’s decisions and/or level of authority. Some institutions go through a policy review process to codify this authority.

4. Operating guidelines for handling cases. Repeat or synopsize best practice procedures on which the team was trained. “This helps make sure the team is checking all the right boxes and making informed assessments,” Randazzo said.

5. Access to support resources. Institutions without a campus counseling center should find a local resource for mental health evaluation and counseling for students and employees. For example, some community colleges partner with local universities so their students can get counseling from the university’s clinical psychology interns, Randazzo said.

“It’s important for team members to understand that the people who carry out campus violence are typically not psychopaths or sociopaths … but they are at a point of personal desperation, and they feel they have no options left,” she said. “They’re often in situations that are fixable or have conditions that are treatable but they just haven’t found the right solution or treatment yet. Threat assessment teams are here to figure out ‘What’s the underlying problem? Why are they considering violence and how can we solve this?’”

Remaining Vigilant

Threat assessment cases never go away, said Owen Yardley, assistant vice chancellor and chief of police at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). “That’s our rule of thumb. Even after the initial situation is resolved, you still have to monitor the situation to make sure it doesn’t re-escalate."

He recalled the university threat assessment team’s intervention in a student suicide attempt. The team’s assessment revealed several trigger points, including the student’s chemical dependency and domestic situation. After undergoing counseling and remaining absent from the university for about a year, the student returned. Then the campus police department identified a pattern of incidents from another jurisdiction.

“We found issues with chemical dependency and domestic calls again,” Yardley said. “So even though everything looked good on the surface, by doing our threat assessment review we could determine the situation was escalating—even though he was hiding it well.”

UNL’s threat assessment program, which started in 2001, involves a two-step intake process: Working with affected departments, campus police handle the initial assessments before forwarding cases to a multidisciplinary threat assessment review team, which meets monthly.

Members of the review team must meet two criteria. “You have to have the ability and the authority to make decisions on behalf of your unit,” Yardley said. “We also try to select those who are conduits of information because we want to use established communication pathways.”

Approximately 20 to 30 percent of the threat assessment cases come from outside the university. “They may gravitate to the university because of mental health issues or a stalking relationship with a student or employee,” he said. “Those you have to keep looking at.”

His law enforcement team receives monthly training though the local chapter of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP) and the organization’s annual conference. Early on, human resources and employee assistance program professionals who were going to be involved in threat assessment attended an ATAP conference to get an understanding of what’s involved. “That turned out to be a smart move because it helped with the buy-in,” Yardley said.

Responding Quickly

The threat assessment team at Auburn University in Alabama meets every other week with additional conference calls and emergency meetings as needed. “We’ve been around seven years and have become a part of campus life,” said Chris A. O’Gwynn, associate director of risk management and safety.

The team includes representatives from the local city police and various campus departments, including public safety, general counsel, provost, student conduct, accessibility, human resources, and counseling. It receives information through a dedicated phone line and email address, as well as from student affairs through the conduct office.

Fortunately, Auburn has not experienced an imminent threat. “We get together not necessarily to stop a campus attack but to assist the student in a real downward spiral who needs help or who needs to step away from campus for a while,” O’Gwynn said.

Often, the issues can be resolved with students. “We tend to swoop in pretty quickly,” he said. “Our conduct office, case management, and counseling center are very proactive. We’re not afraid to go meet students in their classrooms, talk to them, and try to get them resources.”

To keep team training up to date, Auburn schedules periodic webinars as well as two days of intensive training every other year with a consultant. “We look back on cases we did and ask what we could have done differently,” O’Gwynn said. “We’re always in the self-evaluation mode.”

By Margo Vanover Porter, a freelance education and business writer

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