In the wake of the Columbine High School shootings in April 1999, I started receiving calls, mainly from school personnel, asking me to assess the potential dangerousness of students in their schools who had verbally threatened people, written school assignments or personal notes suggesting violent thinking (social media were yet to become popular), or who had been caught with some kind of weapon in school.
At that point, I was a psychologist in a group mental health practice, but I had spent over a decade as the emergency services director at Riverbend, and before that I worked at a facility for those found legally insane after killing someone or multiple people. I was part of the team that decided when to recommend to the courts that a person was ready for release and no longer a threat. I had also developed and taught the mental health course at the Police Standards and Training Academy.
When you perform such an evaluation, there are potentially lives on the line, and an error could mean that one or more people are killed. Multiple pieces of information need to be collected from multiple sources, including teachers, administrators and counselors at the school, therapists and/or doctors who work with the student, and parents and other adults who are heavily involved with the student. Right away, you should note that those in law enforcement don’t usually have access to all that information before an incident happens due to confidentiality and privacy laws.
After all that information is gathered and reviewed, interviews are done with the student and all parental figures involved, all done separately, so information is compared. In those interviews, all those people are asked about the presence of firearms and other potential weapons in the home, such as large hunting knives or archery equipment. The parents are advised to remove those temporarily, at least until the evaluation is completed. I would not usually accept the “they’re locked up” response because most kids, from early adolescence on, know how to get into things without their parents’ knowledge.
Studies on mental health interviews indicate that they alone are not great information sources, so psychological testing is also administered. Not only do they usually provide good information about the person, they help gauge the person’s truthfulness.
In the end, all of the information is put together, some indication about the person’s potential for violence is reached, and recommendations for how to handle the situation are made.
Unfortunately, research indicates that the biggest problem with this process is “false positives,” meaning that so many more people are identified at risk than will ever commit violence. Erring on the side of caution is usually seen as a good outcome, but that can jeopardize the freedom of the person being evaluated.
Even given all of the above, there is limited success in predicting violence, but the practice of gathering information from multiple sources and using objective psychometric testing does improve accuracy. Again, those in law enforcement struggle to get this kind of information in advance of an incident. It usually comes to light after something has happened.
(Mark Ciocca lives in Penacook.)