The New School Threat Assessment Report Every Parent Needs To Know About

Retired Senior Secret Service Agent Don Mihalek checks in to run through a new school threat assessment report that offers insight into school safety across the country.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Let's go to the hoighline and bring in ABC News
Law enforcement contributor and retired senior Secret Service agent Don
Mahellick is back with us to talk about a new
report on threat assessments in schools across the country. So
Don tell us about this report and what it found.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
So about a decade ago, the Secret Service started going
around the country and teaching schools, law enforcement, mental health
professionals about the behavioral threat assessment process from information they
drew from a study they did about school shooters. They
looked at a wide range of school shooters, and they
looked at the behavioral characteristics before they conducted school attacks,

(00:37):
and they pulled together what those behavioral characteristics were and
put it together in a formalized way and went around
and told schools, law enforcement and mental health professionals that
if you see these characteristics playing out, if you see
a student who's focused on violence, if you see a
student who has a terrible home life, if you see
a student who continues to have a perceived or real grievance,

(01:02):
these are potential indicators that they are on a pathway
to violence.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
So you need to mitigate it.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
And the way to mitigate it is through a behavioral
threat assessment strategy which pulls in mental health professionals, teachers, administrators,
and law enforcement to look at the student, look at
where they're at, and figure out are they on that
pathway to violence? And if they are, what can we
do to stop them and get them onto a different path.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
So the Service one around taught around.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
The country and they still to this day hold virtual
sessions and in person sessions teaching this process, and this
report looked at have what they've been teaching helped help
has been helping, And it turns out that eighty eight
percent of principles around the nation that number one, it's
helped reduce violence in their schools and number two, it's
helped better school climate.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
So the one bright.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Spot in schools is that this process, the behavior threat
assessor process, as instructed by the Secret Service, has made
school safe for over the last decade.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
So essentially, what this has done it has created a
first line of defense among teachers and school staff to
keep an eye out for certain behavioral characteristics and then
it kind of put together a plan in place for
how to deal with that before something like what we
saw here in Florida with the Parkland school shooting before

(02:23):
something like that happens.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Absolutely, Parkland drove a lot of this Parkland and the
families from Newtown, Connecticut who are tremendous advocates for school safety,
school security, and violence prevention. The Secret Store has actually
partnered with families from both groups to sort of go
out and do these training sessions. And you know, you

(02:45):
can put up all the hardened doors, security systems, cameras
you want, but the bottom line is if you don't
get to the individual early enough and before they're ready
to commit an active violence, and active violence still may occur.
So this gives teachers, schools, law enforcement, mental professionals a
tool that they can use to identify these individuals in

(03:08):
a behavioral way and then try to help them because
in reality, for kids, for school kids, if they're exhibiting
these behavioral characteristics, it's a cry for help, and we
want to get the kids to help to get them
onto a better path.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
And so many.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
Times we've seen instances where school shooting and mass shooting,
some violent incident has taken place and we look back
and we say, man, there are a lot of red
flags there.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
Markland was the case in point one hundred and eighty
interactions with local police one hundred and something disciplinary actions
in school. But the problem is there, the school didn't
know what the police were doing, and the police didn't
know what the school were doing, so nobody made the
connectivity so that way they could actually do a full
blown threat assessment of the individual. Under the threat assessment process,

(03:56):
the law enforcement officers and the school folks would have
been sitting in a room together and they would have said, Hey,
we keep going.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
To the house and this is what we're seeing.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
And the school folks would have said, this is what
we're seeing and bringing a mental health on and said, okay,
what can we do to add supports to help this
person to prevent them from continuing on what we're looking
at here? And you know, Parkland was the glaring example
of where had this process been in place in Parkland,
it might have prevented what happened.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
ABC News Law enforcement contributor and retired Senior Secret Service
Agent Don Mahallick with us done.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
Really appreciate the time and insight. Thanks so much. Thanks
for having me. Ryan