Report page 9

In 1902, Congress directed the Secret Service to assume full-time responsibility for protecting the President.

In the decades that followed, the agency’s capacity to identify and intervene with those who pose a risk of harm to a protected person became a central feature of its protective mission and came to be known within the Secret Service as Protective Intelligence.

Just as the Secret Service’s mission to prevent assassination using Protective Intelligence is longstanding, so is the agency’s interest in behavioral assessment as a field of scientific study, with the agency’s earliest behavioral science research commissioned in the 1960s.

To further understand the relationship between behavioral assessment and violence prevention, the Secret Service convened a conference in 1981 involving agency representatives and leading behavioral scientists from across the country. One of the resulting recommendations was that the Secret Service establish an internal behavioral science research capacity to continue advancing the agency’s ability to prevent violence.

Relatedly, participant feedback from a subsequent Secret Service conference on stalking behaviors encouraged the agency to conduct an in-depth examination of the most serious known cases of assassination.

These two events led to the Exceptional Case Study Project (ECSP), a research study initiated in 1992 that sought to provide operationally relevant information and guidance to law enforcement agencies and other organizations with protective responsibilities.

The ECSP coined the term targeted violence and established the foundational model of the Secret Service’s behavioral threat assessment approach, which is still in use today.