Introduction

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.

Or put more simply: identify, assess, and manage.

The same behavioral threat assessment model that is used to keep Secret Service protectees safe can be utilized by other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to prevent other forms of targeted violence, including attacks targeting schools, workplaces, houses of worship, and public gatherings.

In 1998, the Secret Service established the National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) to produce research and provide training and consultation on behavioral threat assessment to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.

Today, NTAC continues to lead the field of behavioral threat assessment and assist the agency’s public safety partners in their mission to prevent targeted violence.

As part of its congressionally mandated mission, NTAC produces groundbreaking operational research studies examining targeted violence in a variety of settings and publishes best practice guidance for public safety partners entrusted with ensuring the safety of our communities.

NTAC staff also deliver training by request to tens of thousands of public safety officials every year and routinely consult with a variety of agencies and organizations that are developing their own threat assessment capacities.

In addition to aiding external partners with violence prevention efforts, research produced by NTAC continues to shape the Protective Intelligence methodology used by the Secret Service.

Preventing targeted violence in America is everyone’s responsibility.

Far too often, communities have witnessed mass injury and loss of life at the hands of an attacker, only to learn that the perpetrator had a long history of threatening or concerning behaviors.

In many cases, the attacker’s behavior was witnessed by community bystanders, some of whom sought to report their concerns to public safety officials.

Unfortunately, many communities lack the structured systems to receive, evaluate, and respond to these reports in a way that reduces the likelihood of a violent outcome.

The framework presented herein is the latest NTAC offering intended to support the violence prevention efforts of state and local law enforcement agencies.

The steps that follow describe how agencies can adopt the principles of the Secret Service model to proactively identify and intervene with those who intend to carry out acts of targeted violence in their communities.

These steps are not intended to be prescriptive, but rather offer a scalable blueprint that can be implemented by agencies varying in size, structure, and resources, all of which share the Secret Service’s mission of preventing targeted violence.