By David K. Shipler
Hindsight is 20/20, so looking back, the
warning signs seem crystal clear: the online postings, the violent drawings, the
fascination with guns, the peculiar conduct, the disquiet of his peers, even
the overt threats, which were missed or minimized by educators, police, and
parents. The FBI calls those advance indicators “leakage,” a common
characteristic of mass shootings. The coming danger should have been obvious.
Or should it?
In recent decades, threat assessment
has developed into a sophisticated methodology. So why wasn’t 18-year-old
Payton Gendron stopped before he murdered ten people last Saturday at a Buffalo
supermarket in a mostly Black neighborhood? Why wasn’t 15-year-old Ethan
Crumbley stopped before he killed four and wounded six last November in his
Michigan school?
The general answer lies in the failures
of many local authorities to follow a 22-year-old FBI recommendation to appoint
threat assessment coordinators and teams of skilled professionals on call for
quick mobilization to assess risks. The FBI’s 46-page report from back then, “The
School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective,” is a nuanced analysis
that ought to be in the top desk drawer of every school administrator and
police commander.
“These threat assessment teams have
to be multidisciplinary,” said former Supervisory Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole,
who led the FBI’s project. “The reason is this: A single person looking at
these warning signs might deem them to be not too significant, or they may
inflate them, or they may not know what to do with them.” So, she told me, the
team should include specialists from the school, the mental health profession, juvenile
justice, law enforcement—and ideally, an attorney who could advise on whether,
say, a backpack can be legally searched.
Threat assessment is not a perfect art, and over-zealous reactions carry risks to civil liberties. Preventive arrest in advance of a crime would be egregious. But short of that, measured interventions may have prevented mass shootings in “dozens of cases across the country,” according to Mark Follman, author of Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America, a new book reporting on a team in an Oregon school district. In the case of one boy making threats, the professionals embraced him in a “wraparound” approach of counseling, academic help, and programs in and out of school.
