Threat assessment professionals, who include psychologists and law enforcement agents, work to identify and help potential offenders, guiding students to overcome underlying sources of anger, hopelessness or despair.
These feelings can increase a student's risk of suicide, alcohol and drug use, physical abuse, dropping out and criminal activity.
Senator King commented that additional arms could have been sent by the U.S. government more quickly to aid Ukraine defense if a more reliable assessment would have been performed.
After the 2024 shooting in a Windor, Ga highschool resulted in four deaths, Education Week analyzed the subject in the article, "Why responding to student threats is so complicated.
[29] The family allowed the reporter full access to their experience of not being able to get information from the district and their son feeling singled out and criminalized.
The book "Trigger Points" by Mark Follman (a Mother Jones national affairs editor) covers threat assessments and traces them to an awareness of stalking behavior after the murder of John Lennon and shooting of Ronald Reagan.
Follman elaborates how the field of behavioral threat assessment first grew out of Secret Service[30] and FBI serial-killer investigations.