Threat assessment as a school violence prevention strategy

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12471
• Date: 01 February 2020
• Author: Dewey G. Cornell
• Published date: 01 February 2020

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9133.12471

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

COUNTERING MASS VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES

Threat assessment as a school violence prevention

strategy

Dewey G. Cornell

University of Virginia

Correspondence

DeweyG. Cornell, Curr y Schoolof Education

andHuman Development, University of Vir-

ginia.417 Emmet Street South, Charlottesville,

VA22904.

Email:dcor nell@virginia.edu

Fundinginformation

NationalInstitute of Justice, Office of Jus-

ticePrograms, U.S. Department of Justice,

Grant/AwardNumber: NIJ 2014-CK-BX-0004;

NationalScience Foundation

Preparedfor the George Mason-Carnegie Mel-

lonUniversity work group on mass violence,

fundedby the National Science Foundation.

Thisproject was supported by Grant NIJ 2014-

CK-BX-0004awarded by the National Institute

ofJustice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S.

Department of Justice and conducted in collab-

orationwit h the Center forSchool and Campus

Safetyat the Virginia Department of Criminal

JusticeSer vices. The opinions, findings, and

conclusionsor recommendations expressed

int his report are those of the author and do not

necessarilyreflect those o f the U.S.Depar tment

ofJustice or the Center for School and Campus

Safetyat the Virginia Department of Criminal

JusticeSer vices. The author discloses that he is

the primary developerof t he VirginiaStudent

ThreatAssessment Guidelines and author of

theComprehensive School Threat Assessment

Guidelines.

Research Summary: This paper describes the immense

difficulty of predicting that someone is going to carry out

a school shooting and then turns to threat assessment as a

more promising violence prevention strategy. In schools,

a multidisciplinary threat assessment team investigates

reported threats and develops responses that are calibrated

to the seriousness of the threat and the student’s educa-

tional needs. Researchers have found that school teams

have been able to resolve thousands of student threats with

no serious acts of violence, yet permitting the majority of

students to return to school. Controlled studies have found

that schools using this approach can have reductions in the

use of school suspension and improvements in student and

teacher perceptions of school climate.

Policy Implications: Threat assessment represents a fun-

damental shift in the risk assessment field away from the

pursuit of predictive accuracy toward a broader approach

to the prevention of violence by helping troubled individu-

als. Threat assessment offers schools a proactivealter native

to reactive practices such as zero tolerance discipline and

costly investment in building security measures.

KEYWORDS

school shootings, threat assessment, violence prevention

Efforts to prevent mass violence have pursued the development of prediction strategies to identify

would-be violent offenders before they attack. For decades, the search for predictive indicators has

been the holy grail of violence prevention. Despite the heroic efforts of numerous researchers, there are

Criminology & Public Policy. 2020;19:235–252. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp © 2020 American Society of Criminology 235

236 CORNELL

severe limitations to this approach, especially when applied to the problem of mass violence in schools.

The purpose of this article is to explain why prediction strategies are not feasible for preventing mass

violence in schools and to advocate an alternative approach to distinguish the goals of prediction from

prevention through the strategy of threat assessment.

1WHY PREDICTIONS STRATEGIES ARE NOT FEASIBLE

A wave of shootings in schools in the 1990s generated intense interestin identifying a “school shooter

profile” that would allow for authorities to identify likely offenders. For example, researchers pro-

posed a “classroom avenger” profile of an emotionally troubled adolescent male responding to stress

and humiliation (McGee & DeBenardo, 1999), and multiple organizations promulgated warning signs

checklists to identify students at risk for attacking their school (American Psychological Association,

1999; Dwyer, Osher, & Warger, 1998; National School Safety Center, 1998). The checklists featured

warning signs such as a history of school discipline problems, drug and alcohol use, and problems

with anger. The most critical problem with the profiling approach, however, is that the hypothesized

characteristics of school shooters also fit a much largerpopulation of troubled youth who did not pose a

threat of attacking their school. The authors of the federal warning signs report cautioned that, “Unfor-

tunately there is a real danger that early warning signs will be misinterpreted” and used to stigmatize

or punish students who fit the profile but committed no violent act (Dwyer et al., 1998, p. 7).

Sewell and Mendelsohn (2000) described the statistical problems of profiling potentially violent

youth. The low base rate of school shootings makes them exceptionally difficult to predict. As more

than 99% of schools will not have such an event, any predictive formula would need nearly perfect

accuracy merely to achieve chance levels of prediction. Furthermore, because the warning signs and

other presumed indicators of potential violence (e.g., many attackers were aggrieved loners) occur at a

much higher base rate in the general student population, the use of a prediction formula will generate

a high false-positive rate. The FBI reported noted the following:

One response to the pressure for action may be an effort to identify the next shooter by

developing a “profile” of the typical school shooter. This may sound like a reasonable

preventive measure,but in practice, trying to draw up a catalogue or “checklist” of warn-

ing signs to detect a potential school shooter can be shortsighted, even dangerous. Such

lists, publicized by the media, can end up unfairly labeling many nonviolent students as

potentially dangerous or even lethal. In fact, a great many adolescents who will never

commit violent acts will show some of the behaviors or personality traits included on the

list (O’Toole, 2000, pp. 2–3).

2PREVALENCE OF SHOOTINGS IN SCHOOLS

The extraordinary news attention given to school shootingshas generated the perception t hatt heyare a

ubiquitous phenomenon that renders American schools unsafe (Graf, 2018). The belief that schools are

dangerous locations has justified enormous expenditures of tax dollars on building security measures

such as fortified school entrances, bullet-resistant glass, metal detectors, alarm systems, video cameras,

and even safe rooms where students can hide from a gunman (Linskey, 2013; Schuppe, 2018; Tennent,

2018). Federal and state legislation has funded the deployment of police officers into thousands of

schools despite concerns that officers may criminalize student misbehavior that could otherwise be

handled with school discipline (Morgan, Salomen, Plotkin, & Cohen, 2014; Whitaker et al., 2019).