Can We Predict a Mass Shooting?

                                                         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.

The FBI study is an intricate guide through labyrinths of statements, behaviors, and interactions that might raise concern. Yet it also cautions against using rigid checklists to profile or discipline reflexively. Even a threat is not reliably predictive in itself, the study warns, for it can reflect a mere transitory state of mind.

“It is especially important that a school not deal with threats by simply kicking the problem out the door,” the report advises. “Expelling or suspending a student for making a threat must not be a substitute for careful threat assessment and a considered, consistent policy of intervention.” Punishment alone can be dangerous, “for example, if a student feels unfairly or arbitrarily treated and becomes even angrier and more bent on carrying out a violent act.”

Evaluating a threat is a tricky task, and figuring out when not to punish can be as crucial as deciding when to do so. “To understand human behavior,” O’Toole told me, “you’ve got to have people trained and updated,” able to see not only the alarming signs but also to “look for mitigators that minimize the possibility that someone could act violently.” And that training should extend broadly. “There’s a lot of research on warning behaviors,” she noted, “and those warning behaviors have to be shared with parents, with people who work in schools—the janitorial staff, the people who work in the cafeteria. But you also have to share them with other students. You have to have everybody’s eyes and ears on the issue. Students will come forward.”

It’s common, after a shooting, to hear fellow students say that they had noticed unsettling demeanor or troubling remarks. Yet those who know the person best are often reluctant to report, according to a later FBI study of active shootings between 2000 and 2013. Schoolmates had seen concerning behaviors in 92 percent of the cases, spouses or domestic partners in 87 percent, and teachers or school staff members in 75 percent. And in most shootings, they had noticed the troubling  conduct more than 25 months before the attacks.

“When concerning behavior was observed by others,” the study found, “the most common response was to communicate directly to the active shooter (83%) or do nothing (54%). In 41% of the cases the concerning behavior was reported to law enforcement. Therefore, just because concerning behavior was recognized does not necessarily mean that it was reported to law enforcement.” That’s where training can sensitize people to the warning signs and induce them to communicate.

And what are some of the warning signs? In determining whether to take a threat seriously, the FBI’s school-shooter study lays out a long inventory, along with a cautionary note that some of the characteristics may be displayed by adolescents without any violent inclinations. Furthermore, no elements should be taken with special weight, or in isolation, but rather considered as accumulating factors—and only after an actual threat is made.

That’s the recommended protocol. The assessment examines four areas: a person’s personality gained from those who knew him before the threat; his family dynamics; the school dynamics and relationships; and the social dynamics including the student’s friendships, drug and alcohol use, and access to weapons.

Each area contains multiple elements of potential concern. In the personality category, for example, a low tolerance for frustration and failure, and difficulty coping with conflicts, insults, and other stresses can be revealing. Poor resilience, low self-esteem, inappropriate response to instruction and authority, need for control or attention or respect, an absence of empathy, can be considered troubling.

How parents react to a student’s threat is regarded by the FBI as a critical insight into family dynamics. The adults might set no limits and fail to monitor TV or internet use. They might “seem intimidated by their child. They may fear he will attack them physically if they confront or frustrate him. . . . the child acts as if he were the authority figure, while parents act as if they were the children.” It’s worrisome if “they appear unable to recognize or acknowledge problems in their children and respond quite defensively. . . appear unconcerned, minimize the problem, or reject the reports altogether.” Turbulence in the parental-child relationship, including domestic violence or the child’s contempt for his parent, should be part of the assessment.

 A school’s culture should be examined with an eye to how or whether a student fits in. That can illuminate smoldering grievances. Some shooters, it has emerged later, were victims of bullying, ridicule, or ostracism. “Students and staff may have very different perceptions of the culture, customs, and values in their schools. Assessors need to be aware of how a school’s dynamics are seen by students.” A school with tolerance for disrespectful behavior can be a crucible of violence, and if a student who has made a threat seems detached from school, that goes into the mix of concerns.

 In the area of social dynamics, the FBI observes, “information about a student’s choice of friends and relations with his peers can provide valuable clues to his attitudes, sense of identity, and possible decisions about acting or not acting on a threat.” Today, 22 years later, his interactions on social media would be included in the assessment. Whether he can put his hands on a firearm is a crucial question; some states have “red flag” laws permitting confiscation from someone who makes a threat.

It seems reasonable—again, in retrospect—that if the FBI’s methods of threat assessment had been properly applied, Payton Gendron’s shooting spree last Saturday might have been thwarted. A year ago, while finishing his senior year in high school, he had signaled his intent. To a question about his plans after graduation, he answered: murder-suicide. He claimed he was joking. The intervention was incomplete.

State police took him to a hospital for a psychiatric examination, and he was soon discharged. New York State’s red-flag law was not invoked, and no indication has surfaced that school or law enforcement authorities followed the FBI’s longstanding recommendations for further intervention or inquiry. We don’t yet know much about his family dynamics, but his online racist postings went unnoticed, apparently, although they were reportedly on public sites that could have been inspected without a warrant.

Nor did a proper assessment occur last November before Ethan Crumbley, 15, committed his attack in Michigan, although its indicators were visible in “a mountain of digital evidence,” prosecutors declared. He could have been the poster boy in the FBI’s threat assessment. He pictured himself on social media doing target practice with a pistol that his father had bought him as a gift. Some students had “a bad feeling” about him.

The day before the shooting, a teacher reported to school administrators that she’d seen Crumbley looking on his phone for ammunition to buy. The school tried to contact his parents; his mother sent him a jocular text not to get caught next time. The day of the shooting, a teacher noticed a drawing depicting violence and his words, “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” School officials didn’t help him. They didn’t even look into his backpack—although exigent circumstances, as defined by court precedent, would probably have allowed a warrantless search. He was allowed back in class after his parents wouldn’t take him home; they were later charged with involuntary manslaughter and are scheduled for trial in the fall. Again, none of the FBI’s carefully prescribed inquiries were followed.

In the rear-view mirror, all this looks unambiguous. Even as the FBI gives guidance on “leakage,” though, it counters with careful caveats. As dramatically terrifying as school shootings have been, they are too infrequent to provide a reliably large data base. “Seeking to predict acts that occur as rarely as school shootings is almost impossible,” the study declares. “This is simple statistical logic: when the incidence of any form of violence is very low and a very large number of people have identifiable risk factors, there is no reliable way to pick out from that large group the very few who will actually commit the violent act.”

                So, hazards lurk in both directions—complacency or denial on the one hand, overzealous risk avoidance on the other. It is a problem laced with the pervasive absence of certainty.