Helping the Family of Fallen Virginia Tech Police Officer Deriek Crouse

On behalf of Major Gene Deisinger and our colleagues and friends at the Virginia Tech Police Department, we wanted to provide the latest information on funeral services and the memorial fund to help support the family of fallen Virginia Tech Police Department Officer Deriek Crouse:

Expressions of condolences to the Crouse family or to members of the Virginia Tech Police Department may be sent to VTpolice@vt.edu.

The funeral service will be held at 2 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 12, at Cassell Coliseum on the Virginia Tech campus.

A memorial fund has been established to support the needs of the family of Officer Crouse. Those wishing to contribute can mail checks, payable to “Deriek Crouse Memorial Fund,” to the address below:

National Bank of Blacksburg
Attn: Dana Sutphin
P.O. Box 90002
Blacksburg, VA 24062-9002

Those seeking more information about the fund should call 540-552-2011 and ask to speak with Dana Sutphin, branch manager.

Thank you to all who have expressed their support and concern.

Upcoming Training in Campus Threat Assessment Best Practices

Following the very popular COPS Office campus threat assessment training sessions run by Margolis, Healy & Associates -- we are once again offering a day-long training session on Best Practices in Campus Threat Assessment & Threat Management.   This session will be held on Thursday, January 12, 2012 and will be hosted by Goucher College in Baltimore, MD.  For more information - or to register - please CLICK HERE.

This session is open to all higher education personnel and local law enforcement officials.  Topics will include:

• Current best practices in campus threat assessment and threat management and the new national standards. 
• Case studies of targeted attacks. 
• How to operate an effective campus threat assessment team.  
• Steps to take in identifying, investigating, and evaluating threats and other disturbing behavior on campus.  
• Developing and implementing case management plans to reduce risk. 
• Case studies of prevented incidents.
• Understanding legal issues in campus threat assessment and new legal developments.  
• Finding solutions to common problems facing campus threat assessment teams.

Early Registration is $295 for registrations by December 31, 2011.  Registration after December 31, 2011 is $350.  Click here for more information or to register.

JOB OPENINGS: Positions with NC State and Tidewater Community College

Two new job openings in higher ed threat assessment have just been posted:  

North Carolina State University (Raleigh NC) has posted a job opening for a counselor with an emphasis in threat assessment and threat management.  Click here for more information on the NC State position.  

Tidewater Community College (Virginia) has posted an opening for the Director of Threat Assessment and Staff Psychologist.  Click here for information on the Tidewater CC vacancy announcement.

Two New Threat Assessment Resources

Here are two new resources that we felt are worth highlighting, for those in the threat assessment field or who work with anyone in threat assessment:  

The first is an article in the 2011 issue of the URMIA Journal: "Campus Threat Assessment and Management Teams: What Risk Managers Need to Know Now."  The article covers the emerging standard of care in campus threat assessment, and identifies steps that risk managers can take to make their threat assessment process consistent with the standard of care.  While written for campus risk managers, the article is useful for a broader audience.  This article was co-authored by Jeff Nolan, Esq., Marisa Randazzo, PhD, and Gene Deisinger, Ph.D.

The second is an article from Police Chief magazine on the role of police psychologists as consultants to law enforcement agencies, including in threat assessment.  Gene Deisinger co-wrote this article's section on threat assessment and management.  It offers a great perspective on the various roles that psychologists can play in support of federal, state, and local law enforcement.

5 Pitfalls to Avoid in Threat Assessment

As a follow up to the first article in Higher Ed Impact on tips to make your threat assessment team more effective, Dr. Gene Deisinger discusses five common pitfalls that can plague higher ed threat assessment teams - and ways to avoid them.  According to this second article in Higher Ed Impact, 5 common pitfalls to avoid are:

1. "Focusing solely on increased reporting
2. Focusing only on students
3. Reinventing the wheel
4. Lack of due diligence in vetting possible vendors
5. Failing to follow up, monitor, and assess whether the initial intervention was sufficient."

For the full article - including ways to avoid these pitfalls, please click here.

3 Tips for Making Your Threat Assessment Team More Effective

In the August 4, 2011 edition of Academic Impressions' Higher Ed Impact, Dr. Gene Deisinger outlines three tips for making higher education threat assessment teams more effective, even in the face of budget cuts.  According to the article, the three strategies he recommends are: 

1. "Define your team's mission and purpose clearly.
2. Do more with what you already have by finding opportunities for greater collaboration between departments that provide resources and services to students.
3. Cultivate a sense of shared purpose."

For more on these tips, read the full article here.

Everybody Needs a Vacation - Even in Threat Assessment

 It's "summertime, and the livin' is easy"*....or at least it should be.  But if you serve on a threat assessment team, summertime may not mean the vacations and downtime it means for many people.  Threats and disturbing behavior can occur anytime, and they often require a quick evaluation and rapid intervention.  Being on a threat assessment team can mean working on weekends, over vacations, and late into the night.  

But this does not mean that team members or individual threat managers cannot take a break.  Quite the contrary:  threat assessment team members NEED to take a break every so often.  Threat assessment work is important work. It is often urgent or time sensitive.  And threat assessment work can be a matter of life and death -- literally.  It is this "life and death" aspect of threat assessment and protective intelligence that can make it hard to justify taking a vacation.  But it is precisely what makes taking a break so critical.

My colleagues and I have worked with several threat assessment teams that - to put it bluntly - were burnt out.  In some cases the team members were managing sizable caseloads. In other cases, the team members were juggling their threat assessment responsibilities with the demands of their busy day jobs.  Regardless of the reason for burn out, some ways to help guard against it can include:

• adding "term limits" into a team's policies or procedures, so that individual team members have to rotate off the team every so often; 
• identifying and training alternates for each team member - individuals who are ready to step in and serve on the team for a week - or two - or three -- when needed; and, 
• encouraging team members to look after each other with care - and to say something if they think a fellow team member might need a break.

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey discusses the parable of the goose and the golden egg, to illustrate that you can fail in your work if you fail to take good care of yourself at the same time. I think it's a lesson that's particularly appropriate for threat assessment team members to heed.  Enjoy your summer.

- Marisa R. Randazzo, Ph.D.
* Lyrics from "Summertime" by George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, Dorothy Heyward, and Ira Gershwin

Meeting Murder or Overreacting?

Peter Romary, Senior Consultant with Sigma Threat Management, writes about the need for effective, proven threat management techniques, threat managers, and processes to avoid serious mistakes! Read More "I met Murder on the way He had a face like Castleraegh"

Threat Assessment Q & A

By Marisa R. Randazzo, PhD and Gene Deisinger, PhD

In the course of our seminars and consulting work, we often get questions that we think could be helpful for others to hear. So we have started a new series of blog posts – each labeled “Threat Assessment Q&A” -- to answer these questions and to correct common misunderstandings about threat assessment that appear in the media and elsewhere.  We posted our first Threat Assessment Q & A on March 6, 2011 (click here to read it).

If you have a question about behavioral threat assessment and threat management -- on campus, in the workplace, for public officials and public figures, or in any other domain – please email it to us at Info@SigmaTMA.com and include "Threat Assessment Q&A" in the subject line.  We'll answer some questions and open others up for discussion and debate.  As a reminder, we have guidelines for posting comments on this blog.  Out of respect for all who read and comment here, please make sure you adhere to these guidelines before posting a comment or submitting a question.  Look for more Threat Assessment Q&A posts in the coming weeks.

Threat Assessment Q&A: “Should Counseling Center Staff Conduct ‘Direct Threat’ or ‘Fitness for Duty’ Evaluations?”

By Gene Deisinger, PhD; Jeff Pollard, PhD & Marisa Randazzo, PhD

The question we received this week came from a training session on college/university threat assessment that we conducted in San Diego at the beginning of February 2011. A staff psychologist at a college counseling center asked us:  

Q: “Is it advisable for a college or university to have its counseling center psychologists or psychiatrists conduct "Fitness to Stay" or “Fitness for Re-entry” evaluations on students (both types are evaluations are similar to Fitness for Duty evaluations conducted on employees), and “Direct Threat” evaluations on students or employees”?  

A: While psychologists and psychiatrists on staff at college/university counseling centers may be qualified to conduct such assessments, we recommend that institutions think through several issues before asking this of their mental health professionals.

The first issue is that psychologists’ and psychiatrists’ training do not typically include the skills required for conducting such evaluations -- so colleges and universities should insure that the professional in question has demonstrated post-graduate training, supervised practice, and experience in conducting the evaluations. The professional standards for forensic evaluators or forensic psychologists/psychiatrists are good baselines for measuring the competence and/or setting out training/experience guidelines for someone whose position requires they conduct such evaluations. To be competent, examiners do not have to be certified at the forensic level; however they must possess the necessary training and hands-on experience.

The second issue is the impact that using counseling center staff as evaluators could have on the counseling center’s reputation on campus. Most counseling centers build their reputation and relationship with students as being a service for the students and may actively or implicitly have some advocacy role on behalf of student needs. Conducting evaluations that can negatively impact upon a student's status – that is, on a student’s ability to stay or enter the institution -- often raise concerns (on behalf of students and some faculty/staff) as to whether the center is a true support/advocate for students. While this can be addressed in terms of HOW the services are provided and how they are discussed in the community, it still raises concerns in which many centers choose not to involve themselves. Also, as most of these evaluations are mandated by the college or university as a contingency of enrollment, some centers are reluctant to involve themselves in mandated services. It would be fair to say that there is a good deal of controversy on this question as some professionals/centers do not view mandated services as consistent with counseling center philosophy and a few would go so far as to suggest it is unethical (a view we understand but do not necessarily hold).

Finally, when such evaluations are done internal to the institution - i.e., by a component of the university -- it raises a reasonable question as to the independence, autonomy, and objectivity of the evaluator. It may be reasonable for the person being evaluated to question findings presented by an internal evaluator because the evaluator is an employee or agent of the university and could be assumed (rightly or wrongly) to provide only conclusions that are in line with the university’s stance. Evaluations that are conducted by an external psychologist or psychiatrist make that argument of bias a bit harder to make, presuming the independent evaluator conducts a fair, thorough and objective evaluation.

The last issue we want to raise is that, with respect to high risk evaluations or ones in which there is a fair amount of ambiguity, we find it very helpful to have an objective, independent view from outside the university that either validates our views (from internal evaluations or the threat assessment process) or challenges misperceptions that we may have formed or provides information we could have overlooked. In essence, it can create a check and balance on the institution’s internal decision-making.

While none of these issues would legally prohibit a college or university from using someone on staff to conduct these evaluations, these concerns make it less ideal for an institution to do so internally. We want to be clear that our comments are only in regard to true assessment of dangerousness and fitness for duty evaluations (including fitness to stay and fitness for re-entry evaluations) and are not related to the types of evaluations that college health/counseling services provide routinely -- including intake/diagnostic screening and screening whether someone may benefit from involvement in mental health services -- for which counseling center staff members are highly competent and appropriate.  

College & University Threat Assessment Training - February 1 and 8

In the past few weeks we've received many questions about threat assessment training for higher education institutions.  There are two training sessions coming up in early February that are open to the public: 

February 1 in San Diego CA ($300 per person).  This training is part of a multi-day conference on campus and workplace violence prevention, featuring some of the top experts in the field of threat assessment and threat management.  Please click here for more information and registration details.

February 8 in Tallahassee FL (FREE).  This training is the LAST of ten regional campus threat assessment seminars that have been sponsored by the US Department of Justice COPS Office, and coordinated by Margolis Healy & Associates throughout the US in 2009, 2010, and 2011.  Please click here for more information or to register.  This seminar is open only to personnel at higher education institutions.

If you can't make it to one of these workshops, more information on threat assessment training is available here.

Before You Post a Comment on this Blog....

We encourage you to read the following guidelines before leaving a comment about any post, or about any other comment, on this blog:

Guidelines for Posting a Comment on Current Issues in Threat Assessment & Threat Management

We welcome all thoughts and comments that are related to threat assessment, threat management, violence prevention, and personal safety - as well as debate sparked by incidents of targeted violence or other current events, as long as the commentary is related in some manner to threat assessment, violence prevention, or personal safety.  If you have a comment or reaction to one of our posts, a question you'd like to pose, or a topic that you suggest we cover, we encourage you to post a comment.

We reserve the right to delete any comment that uses expletives or obscene language, or that includes any personal attack or derogatory commentary directed at a particular individual or group.

When you leave a comment, we strongly encourage you to identify yourself by name or at least by first name and last initial.  If you are a fellow professional in the field of threat assessment, threat management, or behavioral intervention, we ask that -- as a professional courtesy -- you identify yourself using your full name and preferably indicate your relationship to the threat assessment community (e.g., your university affiliation; your firm's name; etc.) whenever you post a comment.  If you have a sensitive or confidential comment or question - or anything else you would prefer not to post in the publicly-viewable comments - please feel free to email us directly at Info@SigmaTMA.com.

Any comment that, in our judgment, doesn't adhere to these guidelines will be removed.

In the spirit of Peter Romary's post, we encourage everyone who posts and comments here to be civil and respectful of all the opinions voiced. This is an important area of practice, and one that is under continual development and improvement. I encourage all of us to strive to raise the bar in the field of threat assessment and violence prevention, through our behavior as well as our work.

The Tucson Blame Game: Time To Dial Back The Rhetoric

Published in "The True Verdict" Blog, Peter Romary, a Senior Consultant for Sigma Threat Management, calls for more concern and support for victims and less speculative, inflammatory rhetoric in the wake of the recent shootings. Visit the blog here.

MORE Free Threat Assessment Training

In January and February we will be teaching two FREE, day-long campus threat assessment seminars.  These seminars are the last two that will be provided free of charge to higher education personnel through a generous grant from the U.S. Department of Justice COPS Office.  The last two seminars will be held in Phoenix, AZ (on January 11) and in Tallahassee, FL (on February 8).

If you haven't had a chance to attend one of these sessions, and you work for a college or university, you can click here to register or for more information. In the seminars, we:

• Provide an overview of campus threat assessment & management
• Compare threat assessment with profiling and other assessment approaches
• Explain the steps in the threat assessment process, key investigative questions, and evaluation decisions
• Provide coaching on developing case management strategies; and,
• Discuss strategies for creating and operating an effective a campus threat assessment team.

Since 2009, the COPS Office has made this training available to higher education personnel at cities around the U.S., including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, San Diego, Seattle, Sioux Falls, and Washington DC.  We are honored to have been part of the team involved in creating the curriculum for this training and in providing the training to participants around the country.  Come join us for one of these last seminars!