As summer winds down, the perennial question of how to create a safe and equitable environment for students is on the minds of many school leaders, administrators, and teachers. On this episode of Policy Outsider, we explore the practice of using multi-disciplinary behavioral threat assessment teams to evaluate students who are at risk and recommend holistic and programmatic pathways to make sure their needs are being met.
Guests
Transcript was generated using AI software and may contain errors.
Joel Tirado 00:00
Welcome to Policy Outsider presented by the Rockefeller Institute of Government. I’m Joel Tirado. As summer winds down, the perennial question of how to create a safe and equitable environment for students is on the minds of many school leaders, administrators, and teachers. On this episode of Policy Outsider, we explore the practice of using multi-disciplinary threat assessment teams to evaluate students who are at risk and recommend holistic and programmatic pathways to make sure their needs are being met. Our guests are Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium Executive Director Jaclyn Schildkraut and Eric Madfis, a professor of criminal justice and the director of the Violence Prevention and Transformation Research Collaborative at the University of Washington-Tacoma. That conversation is up next.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 01:00
You. Dr Madfis, thank you so much for joining us today.
Eric Madfis 01:08
Oh, it’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Of course, you know,
Jaclyn Schildkraut 01:12
I think your recent work is going to be very much of interest to our audience, so let’s get into it. You have recently been looking at behavioral threat assessment in schools. So just to kind of set the background for our audience who may not be familiar with this, can you give us a little bit of an overview of what threat assessment is and how it is used in schools?
Eric Madfis 01:30
Yeah. So a lot of my work looks at the causes and prevention of mass shooting in school shootings and other forms of school violence. And you know, what I’ve come to look at is that schools, for a long time have used various forms of violence risk assessment, whether that’s various forms of profiles or warning signs or things that have been used, you know, for the last 20 years or so, which often are quite problematic. I mean, we’re talking about things that that often have lots of false positives, you know, lots of people who might fit a vague profile, you know, what might be like, you know, white boy loners, or might be, you know, dislike school, or some other kind of things that are really broad and applied to, like a lot of the population, right? Or things that are just stereotypes, like the way they dress, or people, you know, things like that that are that are not particularly helpful, right? And so, we know there is no one common profile of the school shooter or people who perpetrate mass shootings more broadly, right? Instead, right? It’s really important to look at this evidence based practice of of threat assessment, right? This is a model that was initially developed by the Secret Service and and what it does, it’s a lot of work by other groups, including the FBI and local schools, to look at the substance of the threat itself, right? You’re not trying to predict things based on profiles or vague warning signs, but actually, sort of look at the substance of the threat. So not all threats, right, are equal, right? It’s in contrast to zero tolerance, type of approaches which often ignore context and just have sort of mandatory school expulsions or suspensions or even arrests for a broad sort of swath of behavior, right? Instead, you’re looking at at the sort of unique interaction and dynamics between, you know, the person making the threat, the target of the threat, the situation. And so the question is, you know, does the person pose a threat? Not, do they just make a threat, right? And so there’s, there’s, there’s, you know, lots of people who might make an off handed comment, what we call like a transient threat, right? You know, something without any real intent to do harm. So, you know, if you say, think about all the kids who, at one point in their life is like, I’m going to kill you, right? That that’s not necessarily, they really mean that right sort of offhanded comment. So not all threats are equivalent, and so part of the things you can, you can do to look at that is, you know, how detailed, how developed, how actionable those threats are. So things like, how direct is it right? Did you actually threaten someone directly? That’s something you can take more seriously. How detailed is it, right? You have detailed plans of who you want to target, when, where, what day, what time, all those kind of things. Is something, you know, take it more seriously, right? How it developed? Did you actually take steps to carry that out? Did you actually, you know, try to get firearms or make homemade bombs or something like this, right? And then how actionable the threat is, right? Do you actually have access to weapons? That sort of speaks to how realistic the threat really is. Do you have a an arsenal of firearms right in your bedroom, like, as some of the cases I’ve looked at happened, right? That’s something that you know you’re going to take more seriously than, you know, a big threat to blow up the moon, that’s something you can’t do, right? And so all of these things sort of help you assess the severity of these threats. So, you know, and I’ve looked at a lot of different averted cases of school shootings, and so some, you know, really, by using these criteria, you’d say, like, really pretty serious. Like, there’s one case where a student had, you know, tons of firearms, homemade weapons, homemade napalm. And a list of who he wanted to kill, when, where, had maps, you know, who we didn’t want to hurt, like, what he was going to wear that day. All those kind of things really say that that’s a pretty serious thing that we should take seriously, versus, like, another case, you know, I looked at was a kid had a list of people he didn’t like, right? And that was interpreted as hit list, which I don’t think it really was, but Right? That’s one that I think was, was maybe over exaggerated, that the level of the severity there, right? So you can look at the substance of it to see how serious to take it. And so threat assessment is really, it’s a key component of a comprehensive school safety strategy. It’s an alternative to those kind of zero tolerance policies that are that are often really quite harmful and counterproductive. And so this, it’s this multidisciplinary team that involves, you know, at the school level, usually you know the administrator, or some administrators mental health experts at the school. So that’s school psychologists or school social workers, usually the SRO or other law enforcement. And so part of that is identifying the threat to commit this sort of violent act and creating a positive school climate that encourages people to come forward if they are exposed to these threats. And then part of that is right, coming together and having this multidisciplinary team determine the severity of the threat, how serious you know, we need to take this thing and then developing an intervention plan that protects victims, you know, if it is an immediate, sort of imminent danger, then intervening, you know, in an arrest, if need be, or whatever needs to happen, or a sort of underlying, sort of solving the underlying problems or conflicts that stimulated the threatening behavior in the first place, through a number of different sort of intervention plans that you that you that the team would develop together. And so this is a process that’s been mandated in a number of states. And Virginia was the first state in the country to do that. It is, it is mandated in since 2020, in Washington State, where I live. And then there are at least 18 states across the country that are increasingly creating these things. So I’m creating these kind of requirements to have some, some form of school threat assessment. So, yeah, it’s a basic
Jaclyn Schildkraut 07:09
overview. No, thank you very thorough. And you know, what’s interesting is, when you were talking about that case that you looked out that seemed to be a very credible threat, you were listing out all of these different, you know, sort of warning signs, behaviors, you know, calls to action. It sounded so much like Columbine, and that made me think about the fact that you know you and I go way back. We’ve known each other for more years than I will admit to on a recording. But you know, for those who also don’t have the benefit of knowing you, what really got you into this? You know, I obviously like learned about you through the school shootings research, but what got you into looking more into threat assessment?
Eric Madfis 07:44
Yes, true. Jackie, I was thinking it’s, we’ve been at a conference way, way back quite, a quite a while ago. So yeah, it’s been, it’s been a this, you know, a times rewarding, often difficult sort of thing. We’ve, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve both been doing for for some time now. So part of it actually is I got interested in studying school shootings and mass shootings in parkers. There was an incident my own high school right where there was a threat that, I think, you know, there was someone wrote in a bathroom stall, like, you know, Columbine could happen here, and they wrote a date. And so, you know, there’s lots of talk in the community about whether or not you should have school that day. I ultimately did go to school that day. They did have school, but there’s kind of only a few people in class. Every every single class that I have, you have about three or four people. And so at the end of the day, I’m walking out of my last class, out of my physics class with my with a good friend of mine. And now this, this friend of mine is, like, you know, not necessarily the best student, not necessarily the least truant student or whatever. But like, not, you know, not a violent kid, not not a dangerous kid by any means. And so we’re walking to our locker together, and he says to me, you know, boy today sure was disappointed, right? That’s his, his. That’s what he says to me, and he and he says this as we’re turning a corner, and as we turn that corner, the vice principal, the one in charge of discipline for the school, turns the corner the exact same time and overhears this, and basically it gets interpreted as a threat, right? And so there’s lots of ways you can interpret that. I mean, you could say, you know, first of all, was he the one who wrote the bathroom the graffiti? No, did He mean today was disappointing because there weren’t enough kids at the school to shoot them up. Definitely not. He definitely didn’t mean that. Did he mean, like, today was disappointing? Because I’m, you know, he’s like, we’re like, you know, sarcastic, you know, you know, teenage boys, right? Did he mean, like, you know, there’s all this hype, all this this fear and about this, and then nothing happened. That’s probably, that’s what I think he actually meant. But he could have also meant, you know, today was disappointing. Why bother coming to school? We didn’t do anything, right? There’s lots of ways you can interpret that, right, but in this was happening, right? This was like, like 1999 right? So this is, this is in the context of Columbine, and the reaction to Columbine, which was very much this zero tolerance sort of climate, where, if you, if you, you know, wore black, or dress different, and things like that. Or, you know, maybe any kind of basic threat, right? This was interpreted like much more seriously. So rather than having this threat assessment approach, right, basically, this was interpreted as threatened. And he was, he was suspended again, given the lengthy suspension, but really was discouraged from coming back to school. So basically, sort of, that was his last day of school. He later got his GED and stuff. But so that made me think about, you know, what are better reactions? What are more sort of helpful solutions than just, like, punishing everyone across the board in this kind of way? And so part of that, you know, when I went to college, I was able to study with Dr Jack Levin, who is one of the, like, original sort of creators, wrote the first book about mass murder, and sort of the founders of scholarship on on mass shootings and school shootings. So I was able to study under him, eventually become his research assistant and and really my career to try to understand this stuff and and to look at kind of better solutions that really address this stuff, rather than just react to
Jaclyn Schildkraut 10:59
It sounds like from your your sort of summary of threat assessment, that it can be used and really helpful in so many different ways, right? We know that kids today in school, especially coming out of a pant global pandemic, are facing all sorts of strains and stressors. We know bullying in schools, while not necessarily a cause of school shootings, is prevalent across our country, but thinking about, you know, our focus here, how can we specifically use threat assessment in helping to prevent gun
Eric Madfis 11:30
violence? Yeah, so, you know, I mentioned this was initially created by the by the Secret Service. Right for assessment comes from that, and particularly it was designed to prevent like political assassinations. So right, gun violence is at the root of of what Threat Assessment sort of was always about focusing on, right? And then when it was created, it was kind of created in simultaneously, right after Columbine in in Oregon, out of the Salem Kaiser School District in Oregon, and then also in Virginia Public Schools are sort of where those, those things first grew out of in schools. And so it’s always been this particular focus on gun violence, and particularly mass school shootings. From the outset, though, it is right, yeah, used for all sorts of different forms of school concern. So whether that’s verbal threats, whether that’s bullying, whether that’s gang violence, domestic violence, all sorts of other things it can be used for and so, yeah, it’s definitely a crucial part of of what, what, what threat assessment looks at.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 12:30
Awesome. Now you and your research partners have been examining how threat assessment teams are being used in schools, specifically in the Pacific Northwest. Can you tell us a little bit about the research you’ve been conducting and the questions you’re trying to answer.
Eric Madfis 12:42
Yeah, well, so a lot of my initial research back to my dissertation, actually, and my first book was looking at, like, what actually prevents school attacks. And so, you know, there’s a lot of things to do in schools that don’t particularly help, you know, fewer tolerance policies I mentioned, but also, like arming teachers or metal detectors, things like that that we know don’t work partially thanks to some Jackie’s work, right? And so, um, what I want to look at was like, what actually averts these things? So I looked at at averted incidents of school shootings on this was back in northeast when I when I was living there and and what I found was, was part of it is about like, you know, student bystanders, when students are exposed to what we call leakage, right? So when people often, when they are plotting these things or planning these things, they tell other people, or they warn other people, or they threaten other people, you know, say, Don’t come to school next Tuesday, or things, something like that, right? And so it’s crucial that when, when people are exposed to that, for students to come forward, right? So that’s part of it. And then the other part really was looking at what actually, when you have someone come forward, and then there’s the school, the community is aware of a threat, what do you do? And so what I found was, like, threat assessment was much, much better than the other forms of risk assessment that were often used and that. So at the time, I found, you know, people did use various vague warning signs or profile kind of criteria, you know, thinking about, you know, how people looked, or they’re dressed, or their demographics and stuff like that. You know, where they, you know, loaders in the school or something like that. But they also, but they but they but they definitely looked at at threat assessment criteria too. And the threat assessment criteria was the stuff that give them the most confidence in their assessments, frankly, was most helpful when they were if they needed to have a prosecution or adjudication in the juvenile justice system. That those are kind of criteria that was most useful. And so as a result, I’ve been really interested in looking at threat assessment and school threat assessment, and how that can be a system for preventing school shootings, but violence in schools more broadly and so then I came to University of Washington, Tacoma, right and looking at threat assessment here. Sure. There Really a lot of the studies of school threat assessment has been particularly out of Virginia, from scholar named Dewey Cornell, and a lot of his work out of the and his network of researchers at the University of Virginia. So there’s a lot of research out of Virginia about school threat assessment, and there’s a few researchers who’ve done stuff in out of out of Dewey has also done some work up to Cornell, out of out of Florida and some other locations. And there’s been some work out of out of out of Colorado as well, but there’s really been no research out of out of the Northwest. And part of that’s important because the Northwest uses a different model of school threat assessment, what’s called the Salem Kaiser cascade threat assessment model, which, as I mentioned before, comes out of, I was created by by school psychologists out of the Salem Kaiser School District in Oregon. And so there really wasn’t, that’s a model that’s that’s based on, on, you know, evidence based practices, but was not really evaluated by, like, peer reviewed, sort of, kind of way, by scholars, either quantitatively or qualitatively. So I was very interested in looking at that model in particular. I can talk about how it’s a little bit different, but also looking at at, you know, how that applies in the Northwest. And so I am doing, and I’ve couple publications looking at at this particular model and looking at schools in particularly Washington and Oregon and so, first of all, just mentioned, the way that the Salem Kaiser model is a little bit different. Part of it is that it has emphasis on, like a two tiered system. So it has, like a first school based sort of threat assessment team, which I mentioned, is usually led by an administrator, and you have, you know, SRO, or the law enforcement, mental health folks you know, counselors or social workers, school psychologists, stuff like that. Sometimes teachers, people who are, you know, involved in the student’s life and can help assess their situation, right? And then if they come up with an intervention team, if they feel like that’s working and they solve the problem, then that’s the end of that. But if it’s not, if they feel like they’re still you know, ongoing concerns, or this is severe enough that we need to have more of an intervention, then they have engage a community level team, which actually I’m on the community level team for our sort of local school district as well. And that community level team involves sort of broader, broader folks right from the community, so that that can involve other local law enforcement, juvenile justice, other caseworkers, or other mental health organizations outside the school community, stuff like that, to bring in and assess the threat if it’s more serious, right? So that’s a basic overview, right? And so what we did is, is we looked at data from a particular school district around here that’s been doing it for a while, and looked at a number of different outcomes. So we wanted to know, basically, you know, how it’s being implemented. You know, how are they putting these, these sort of teams, into practice, right? It’s a fairly new practice, right? I said it’s only sort of mandated since 2020 and even then it was the pandemic. So it took a while for that really to happen. And so looking at, you know, what the teams look like, who’s involved, what kinds of cases they’re handling, you know, are they following the protocol, that kind of stuff? What are successes and ongoing issues and barriers to successful threat assessment practices? So we looked at sort of quantitative data from from school records of these threat assessments. And I’ll talk about these, you know, some other questions that I know you have about about that. So I’ll talk about more about that, looking at particular sort of racial outcomes, and looking at cases where there were sort of firearm concerns and school shooting concerns specifically. So that’s a couple different studies we have already published. And then the other big project is is doing in depth interviews with school threat assessment team members. So interviews with a lot of threat assessment coordinators. We’re often in charge of this process for their for their district administrators, so principals and superintendents, vice and assistant principals, so forth, many SROs, school resource officers, social workers, school psychologists, about sort of the process, how they view things, and particularly about how they perceived success. So it’s things like, you know, did they actually follow the protocol, right? Was one thing that people talked about a lot, right? Was it actually sort of truly multidisciplinary? Did everyone sort of have a shared voice at the table? You know? How was that? How did that collaborative team process unfold? That work out? Well, you know, trying to make sure that you have checks for bias and lacking, you know, any kind of implicit or explicit bias against, particularly like students of color or students with disabilities, and also sort of having this, this paradigm shift right, a big part of threat assessment is moving away from punitive, zero tolerance kind of approaches to thinking about things in terms of more. Holistic way about how we we help the kid, keep them in school and and address their issues, right? And so that was, that was part of it. And then the other part was looking at at outcomes, so seeing if they could actually, you know, reduced crime or violence in the school. If it reduced school exclusions, you know, expulsions or suspensions, did it reduce, you know, the increased perceptions of safety, did it support students and help keep them in school? Those are all sort of things that they looked at as as positive outcomes. And then some of the barriers were things like, you know, always in schools there. The barriers are always sort of around funding and enough like having enough time to do those kind of trainings and stuff like that, which is a sort of persistent issue in all aspects of if you work in K 12 schools, that’s a problem for everything. But that was definitely a big issue they found as well having the funding and time for these kind of trainings, as well as sort of just having enough support for the mental health staff, which unfortunately, schools just don’t have enough resources for in general. So that also translates to not have enough of those staff to be on on teams as well. So those are some of the things we’re looking at, as well as sort of a study of the role of law enforcement team. So those are some of the things that we’re studying currently, and have some some articles in the works.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 21:16
So sounds like you guys have been pursuing a lot of different avenues. You know, one thing that I want to ask about, because you mentioned it quite a few times, is the importance of having a multidisciplinary team. And especially, what I find really interesting, and what you’ve raised is the, you know, the role of law enforcement in these teams. What are you sort of seeing as you’re getting out there and talking to people, you know, especially thinking about this zero tolerance or more punitive idea? Yeah, yeah. So that was
Eric Madfis 21:41
an interesting question that I did talk to everyone about. And this was also happening, right? I did a lot of these interviews from like, 2021, to most recently. And so the context of that also was where, at least in Seattle and Portland, you know, close to where I live, there were arguments about about not having, like, any contracts with school resource officers. So that’s sort of a interesting context for the conversation, I think, around the role of systemic bias and racism and stuff like that. And so one of the things I did talk to all my sort of respondents interview subjects about was the role of law enforcement on threat assessment teams and their opinions around that, which varied a great deal, in general. But what did vary? I mean, it was definitely true that, across the board, everyone thought they were valuable and important part of the team, and I can talk about that in particular, you know, the things that they can do that no one else on the team can do so things like, you know, only the only sort of a police officer can execute search warrants or through a particular utility in terms of cases where there’s an imminent danger, they can do weapons checks at someone’s home. If they’re worried that the kid has access to firearms, they can go home and check that and deal with that, right? The oldest who can do arrests, right? They can do records checks and and get the past history if they had any previous, you know, run ins with the law or kind of records, or even with their family, right? If the family had had those kind of, those kind of histories. And also, they can share them in a way that, like child protective services and other groups that might be on the team can’t. So that’s a particular utility. They also, you know, have have knowledge around legal proceedings, how you can do sort of interviewing things, right this particular laws around how you interview kids, for example, that the police would know that other people on the team would necessarily know. Another big one was a lot of people talked about the rapport that particularly SROs had because they’re in the school and they know people, and they have that, that ability to, you know, when exposed to, you know, if someone’s exposed to, to leakage, to these threats, that they would maybe trust the SRO more than you know their local police officer they didn’t know, right? So that kind of rapport building. So those are, like the benefits, those the positive things, the concerns that people mentioned certainly were around police officers still maintaining sort of a more punitive, sort of zero tolerance mindset. And that was a concern expressed by several of the other people on threat assessment teams. And quite frankly, it was reflective in some of the SROs that I interviewed too, who also, you know, still express this, this mindset, which I think is a matter of, you know, transitioning from, you know, the approach where, you know, they tend to see things, and there’s other research that shows this, in about SROs, more generally, tend to see things as crime problems right to be solved, sort of like in a criminal justice kind of way, rather than, you know, behavior issues and something that’s just a school discipline issue. So there is a, yeah, the concern around around, you know, and there also is concerned around, you know, this is, this is, you know, the voice in the room who has, like, you know, the one person with a gun in the room, so that has outsized, you know, you know, impact. And so concerns around around, you know that that outside voice that could happen, so the idea of about, certainly, you know, a number of of crucial benefits. But also can. Concerns about how you mitigate those kinds of of concerns and make sure you have the everyone has the proper kind of time, kinds of training to really have this, this threat assessment mindset, right, this sort of less punitive kind of approach to things and and also, you know, making sure that that everyone at the table has sort of a an equal voice about about what you do and how you, how you, how you do things. So, yeah, those are so I think definitely some practical implications there are pretty serious and and it was interesting to to look at that. I think that’s something that really has, hasn’t been looked at before.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 25:35
Super interesting. You know, when we think about gun violence in schools, obviously, our minds immediately go to things like Columbine to Sandy Hook to Parkland to Uvalde. And you know, from both of our research, we know that these are, of course, among the rarest of incidents and rarest forms of gun violence in general. But when we’re thinking about threat assessment teams and firearms, are these the most common types of threats that they’re being faced with, or are they seeing other types of firearm related threats?
Eric Madfis 26:06
Yeah, so there’s a number of different firearm concerns that came up, right? So, you know, things you know, like students just, you know, expressing fascination with prior shootings. Sometimes, you know, if it was even just like, you know, they were obsessed with and had a particularly pathological obsession with video games, which and any of the threat assessment, it wasn’t just like that was the only concern. It was never a concern that it was just that, right? It was sort of that in conjunction with a number of other sort of existing threats that was happening, right? And so, but what we what we did find is, is looking at this stuff and looking at all the firearm related concerns in this sample that that basically over half, about, like nearly, talking about 55% of all level two threat assessments. So we’re talking about the most serious ones, the cases that were that were serious enough to be brought to the community level team, right? Had at least one gun related issue, right? So that’s significance we’re talking about, I think real concerns in that way. And so, you know, we talked about that, you know, I think it’s important that this approach really is looking at the most serious cases, right, and are identifying what assessment was, was designed to do these, you know, significant cases of student gun violence. And so it is things that, you know, kids bringing toy guns to school, or a general interest in firearms. These were things that were mentioned, but those are pretty rare. And, you know, importantly, they were always part of a pattern of, like, a larger pattern of concerning behavior. So it is true that we found basically this threat assessment approach. Really did, you know, push against that sort of zero tolerance approach. So students, you know, where students are, you know, suspended for, you know, making a vague threat, like my friend or that, you know, this cases of student like, you know, making a finger gun and saying Pow, pow, or something like that. This case of kids getting, you know, suspended for stuff like that, right? So it isn’t the cases like that. We didn’t see any cases like that in this level, two data, those kind of minor things. It really was, at least in this school district that has been doing a threat assessment for a long time. It really was those more severe cases. And what’s interesting about that, also, I should say, is if you look at how many cases we found, right? So it was just one school district, right? And we found an average of 12 school shooting threats per year that were serious enough to trigger again, this, this sort of more serious level two Threat Assessment investigation. And so that’s just in one school district, right? And so to put that in context, you know, I’ve looked at cases of school shooting threats like across the country, and how many, you know, and a lot of other researchers have as well, right? And usually they find, like, somewhere, 2345, sometimes 20, depending on how you define it, and the 20, like some of like my research that was like, you know, any anything that anyone perceived at any time to be a threat. So again, that’s like, you know, real minor stuff, like someone made a list or and that also includes not just school shootings, but school, you know, potentially averted school bombings, or school staffing, other things too. So it’s a much broader term, right? But we’re talking about a few and that’s like the whole country, right for the year. So we found right 12 just in this one school district, which I think speaks to the fact that there’s a lot more sort of beneath the surface that the public doesn’t always know about, and again, that a lot of our if, you know, look at a lot of research in mass shootings and school shootings, is based on, unlike media coverage, and so it is missing, I think, a lot of cases that just don’t get reported in the media. So yes, I think that’s a big, big takeaway for sure. Are
Jaclyn Schildkraut 29:37
you also seeing, you know, in addition to students who are threatening harm against other students or their teachers, or just the school in general. Are you also seeing in these level two threat assessment teams that it’s also students who are threatening self harm, or are they able to more successfully address that sort of at level one in in the school?
Eric Madfis 29:56
Yeah, so, so a lot in the level two, for sure, and definitely a lot. Of these cases that were firearm concerns too. And we know that’s true. If you look at, like, a lot of the research on school shootings in general, right? You know, talk about, like, the discourse around a lot of mental health and stuff like that that, you know, it is pretty common that they often have either suicidal ideation or depression, right? That’s sort of what’s most common, not like schizophrenia or other kinds of things that maybe people sometimes perceive, and so that was also true in our data. Of these cases too, it is true they were often boys. That’s, again, that’s not a surprise, right? The vast majority of school shootings, mass shootings committed by boys and men. But that was also true of our sample. But also, yeah, absolutely, the vast majority were sort of had some, um, kind of suicidal ideation, right? These are students who, um, you know, which, I guess, reinforces what we know like, right? If you think about these kind of things, um, their students are not just like, angry and aggressive, they’re also sort of deeply distressed, right? And they often need to have support systems in place, and not just punishment, because, right? These are often mental health crises, and so it’s really important to address sort of suicidal ideation and concerns around suicide and depression among young people more broadly, because that will not only help them address that issue, but also is a form of violence prevention too well.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 31:16
And it’s interesting what it sounds like. It reminds me of one of your very first articles that I read, which you wrote with Dr Levin, and that was about this idea of cumulative strain, right? That it’s never just sort of the straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back. It’s sort of all of these different things working in concert, as you’re kind of looking across all of these different students of concern. Are you seeing that element of cumulative strain playing out, or is that a similarity among them? Yeah.
Eric Madfis 31:43
I mean, certainly these are people who have a lot of, like, life stressors. That’s a big part of cumulative strain like they have, you know, difficulties in their in their in their life, or in their school settings and their family life and stuff like that. And often people who don’t have the social supports that they need, they don’t have enough, you know, you know, mentors or friends or family connections, that’s often a problem. But even like stuff like, you know, knowing that that part of like, you know, strain is like people plan these things and think them through, and so, right? That’s another thing that we know right from threat assessment and these kind of cases, is that like people plan these things, you know, a while in advance. It’s not like a spur the moment. You know, snap decision, right? Someone just snapped. That’s not, we know that’s that’s not really true for school shootings and mass shootings. And I think there’s a lot of evidence in this threat assessment data, too, that people are, you know, planning things. They’re telling other people, they’re they’re obsessed with prior cases. These are all kind of sort of warning signs that I think people can look out for,
Jaclyn Schildkraut 32:42
thinking about that, you know, and kind of knowing the work that you’re doing with these threat assessment teams, and the immense amount of data that you’ve actually been able to collect, which is incredibly impressive. How are these threat assessment teams learning about students of concern? I know that you’ve written and talked about, you know, bystander effects and how that’s such a persistent problem in schools with the code of silence. But how are they finding out about these students of concern to be able to help them? Yeah.
Eric Madfis 33:08
So, you know, from the very sort of outset of of my research on this, right, we found that it that is a crucial role that, right, when, when people get get exposed to these kind of threats, it’s really important that people come forward, right? And so, you know, in some of my early work, we found like that was, that was true of students coming forward, sort of, that’s the most common group. We found that here too students, but also staff and teachers and stuff coming forward when they were exposed to to knowledge about these kind of threats. So that that was, that was, that’s been sort of a consistent finding it in my work and the work of a lot of a lot of other people too. And so that’s really a crucial part of, you know, getting that knowledge out that people should come forward. Part of also is like building a culture of of trust, you know, a positive school climate where people feel comfortable coming forward, right? So students, if they’re exposed to this kind of leakage, to these kind of knowledge about a threat, that they feel like they’re not going to get in trouble, for example, themselves for coming forward. That’s another issue with zero tolerance policies. But also, you know, feeling like it’s going to be taken seriously, that they can trust the people in the school and so building a community where where that that happens and people feel comfortable coming forward is is really crucial, as are, you know, having the kind of systems that are in place that that students can feel comfortable coming forward, so things like, you know, if you need to have anonymous reporting systems, or if you need to have any other kind of, you know, peer led programs or bystander trainings to really make people aware of that kind of stuff so they can Know, not only like, you know, not to overreact sometimes, but also when to take something super seriously and that you got to really come forward and and deal with this. And so, you know, I think that’s, that’s a crucial takeaway too.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 34:54
You know, it’s interesting. You pointed out that the number of very severe sort of level two threats that. You guys had in the school district that you’re working in is visibly higher than we’ve seen in other districts around the nation. And I’m wondering, you know, when you were talking to these members of the threat assessment team, both you know the school based persons and also some of the more community based stakeholders, like law enforcement and others, are any of them expressing concerns that even though they have all this information, there may be threats they don’t even know
Eric Madfis 35:25
about? Yeah, I mean, I think it’s hard. I mean, I think, particularly, what I thought a lot of people will talk about is, like, just anything that’s that’s on the internet, and how difficult, like it is to navigate social media and privacy protections around that. And I’ll just, I think that’s just a space that really is, is like a new frontier that people don’t know how to handle. And I think that’s a space where, I mean, certainly, there’s definitely cases where threats came to the, you know, the attention of of police or school officials because of, like, social media posts, that definitely has happened. But I think that it’s still, it’s definitely a space where people, I think, are having a hard time figuring out how to, how to figure that out for sure,
Jaclyn Schildkraut 36:05
well, and it’s interesting, you know, I think a lot about parkland. And, you know, this was an individual who was like, posting very, very obscene threats, but then would take them down and create a whole new profile and do it again. And, you know, social media, even though we all know it’s written in pen, you know, rather than pencil, so to speak, still erasable pens and it, you know, it sort of feels a little bit like whack a mole, if you will, trying to capture things before they get taken down. You know, thinking about this is, there, has there been any conversation about how to better engage bystanders, to come forward?
Eric Madfis 36:41
Yeah. So I think that’s a really important part about about thinking about that, right? It’s a crucial opportunity for for intervention here, right? And so I think that’s pretty important around, you know, who gets those kind of messages, right? So sometimes you have, you have, you know, see something, say something, or these kind of campaigns around, around students. But I think it’s also crucial that just sort of parents and teachers sort of have a better understanding about threat assessment in general, and bystander, sort of the role of bystander intervention in these things. And so a lot of that is about education. It’s about building trust. And so I think part of that is like having people understand that threat assessment isn’t just about about punishment, right? It sort of is about support and prevention. And I think if you frame it that way, you help sort of shift the mindset from like, I don’t want to get them in trouble, to right. I want to make sure they’re okay and that then that others are safe, right? So I think that’s a helpful frame. And then also, part of it really is about making sure that we, that we, you know, teach people about basic kind of warning signs and things like this that I think, you know, unfortunately, in a lot of times, it’s just at least this is true in Washington State. I know, like a lot of people, who are only trained in threat assessment and stuff, are the people on the teams themselves. And so your average sort of teacher or social worker or, you know, school staff member doesn’t get the same kind of level of understanding. And some of this stuff is detailed, and you need to sort of, you know, be, you know, officially, you know, certified and stuff like that. But some of it is, like, real basic, like, we’ve talked about some real basic things about, you know, to be concerned. If someone is talking obsessively about violence, you know, expressing suicidal thoughts, right? They have dramatic personality changes, right? Glorifying past school shooters, that’s a big one, right? These kind of things are, I think, helpful for everyone to think about, or this stuff about, like, you know, how to develop direct, actionable those kind of things, I think, are simple things that, like, everyone can know, and then sort of assess that, like, you know, when you really need to take this seriously and tell other people
Jaclyn Schildkraut 38:48
absolutely, you know, you mentioned this a little bit earlier. And I think, as you know, kind of thinking about schools in general, and sort of the state of affairs in our country, obviously, there’s a lot of concern around racial equity in schools. Are there any key findings or considerations related to threat assessment that’s been emerging out of your
Eric Madfis 39:07
work? Yeah, so that’s that’s a really crucial issue, right? And it definitely is. It’s actually our, the first study we published was in um school psychology review about sort of racial disparities, um, in threat assessment. And so this, I’ll say, this is a huge issue, you know, with systemic racism across, you know, criminal legal systems, in the juvenile justice systems, and sort of even in just pretty significant disparities, if you look at a discipline in school, exclusions by race and ethnicity or by special ed status, right? These are pretty significant, serious disparities that you have, even, you know, when comparing to like kids doing the same behaviors, right? And so that is a broad systemic issue that we see in a lot of areas of like, you know, youth justice. And so we were interested in looking at that as well. All. And so you know, it is interesting. If you look at prior studies that have looked at this out of, out of particularly out of Virginia and Colorado, and what you tend to find is that it actually like like racial disparities are either dramatically reduced, or like are not present at all, and that’s a big deal. And there’s all this very few school practices where you can say that. So it is like is a pretty successful evidence based practice in terms of just alone, like the violence prevention elements, aside, at reducing school exclusions and those kind of things and suspensions and expulsions, but also at reducing just broadly, racial and ethnic disparities. And so that’s that was true in other scholarship, and that was true in our in our data from the Pacific Northwest as well. And so what we did to look at this is we looked at all the range of recommendations that school threat assessment teams make from various things, like, like, you know, do they recommend additional support systems, like, you know, skills, building programs, various community programs, like you know, anger management or something like this, substance abuse programs, mentoring. Do they recommend? You know, even just like updating their their IEP, their educational plan, or their schedules in some way, or who pick them up and drop them off, things like this, so or are additional supports from mental health, social work, other special education, those kind of supports, right? And we also looked at at Ben, there are sort of various surveillance recommendations. And sometimes they would recommend, like, you know, both of these simultaneously, sometimes more one of the other. And so surveillance recommendations things like, you know, do you check a student’s locker or their backpack every day or every week or something like this, right? Do you actually go to their home and check to see if they have weapons? Right? Maybe that’s discussions with parents about, do they have access to guns at all, things like that. Are you monitoring their social media? Maybe, maybe, are you alerting staff to or potential victims things like this, right? Or actually arrests, right? So we broke those out by sort of supportive recommendations and versus surveillance type of recommendations, and see and broke them up by race. And what we found is there really were very few differences, right, broadly, you know, and the differences that we did found were kind of, you know, not statistically significant. So really, like, it really gave further support, right in line with the other studies that that came out of Colorado and Virginia, that really and actually, more recently, in Florida as well, that this stuff really does, does reduce or completely eliminate racial disparities, that’s a huge deal. The one thing they do find is that, you know, it is true that students of color and students with disabilities are more likely to experience a threat assessment, to like, go through the threat assessment process. But I think both for my data and the data from from Colorado also found that it isn’t about like, who actually experienced the threat assessment, it’s about what the outcome is, right? And so other data looked at like discipline outcomes, and they found, you know, even if you go through assessment, threat assessment, that isn’t necessarily the issue, the question is, like, what comes out of that? Are you supported? Did you find some kind of additional help or services from that? That’s not necessarily a bad thing, right? As opposed to just, you’re just being unnecessarily targeted. So I think that that’s the key to the key sort of outcome measure that that’s crucial there. And again, it’s really important to, you know, do this correctly, and to and to not have this perception that it’s just about punishment, because it really can be a supportive mechanism. And so I think different schools have different levels of safeguards around bias, right, whether that’s training processes, whether that’s like making sure you have particularly diverse team members on the teams, or making sure there’s, like, a clear, objective process, and that can definitely help reduce disparities and create transparency and consistency. So I would say it’s not necessarily perfect everywhere, all over the country, and there are differences, but it’s really, I think, crucial work moving in the right direction, and actually is, is pretty impressive in terms of the outcomes that you see relative to, like, basically almost all the kinds of of school discipline interventions that we have.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 44:14
So we’re coming back to school. We’re getting ready to come back to school on the heels of several mass shootings, obviously, that weren’t in schools, but gun violence is going to be top of mind for a lot of people thinking about that. What are one to two key takeaways that you think that schools should really think about related to threat assessment as they’re moving into the new academic year?
Eric Madfis 44:33
Yeah, so I think just first of all, thinking about threat assessment as a solution is something that you know is growing and more states are doing and that’s true in both blue states and red states, and it is sort of increasingly becoming more common, but it’s not done everywhere, right? And so part of it is, is that it is a better, more evidence based approach than, you know, some of the stuff we’ve talked about, you know, Army teachers, metal detectors that you have as responses that come up every single after you have a school or math. Shooting, right? And so it’s important to look at that and and all the benefits that it has that’s been proven to not only reduce no school exclusions and reduce racial disparities, but also actually reduce school violence, and actually has averted, you know, what potentially could be quite deadly incidents of of school violence. So that first thing I’d say is just like, like, look into threat assessment and think about that, right? And then also think about sort of, you know, that this is, you know, a process that isn’t just about, you know, an isolated incident. It often looks at patterns of behavior, right? So these kind of ongoing warning signs I mentioned, right? You know, telling other people this kind of leakage about your intent, right? You know, this kind of showing this intense interest in prior shootings, displaying signs of emotional distress, these kind of things, and that picking up on context and sort of escalation. These are sort of critical themes that that are crucial to look at and and part of that is, right, if it is about suicidal ideation, that we have to take that stuff more seriously and provide counseling, support services, sort of, you know, these kind of forms of intervention, crucially, and I think broadly, right, it’s about looking at the substance over fear, right? I think there’s a tendency, especially with the media, to overreact to things like, you know, sometimes like toy guns or joking comments, right? But I think the research shows that that, you know, well executed threat assessments avoid those kind of zero tolerance traps, and it’s more nuanced, and it can distinguish between a kid being silly and a kid showing real intent. So I think that’s something we need to keep reinforcing. And so I guess the biggest way is that threat assessment, you know, it’s best when it’s holistic, right? It’s not just about catching bad behavior, but about identifying the students in crisis, engaging bystanders, avoiding sort of nature discipline, and building school environments where right people feel like they can come forward, or this is connections between school staff and students, and that focuses on on, you know, conflict resolution, solving problems and and kids feel uncomfortable coming forward, right? So I think it’s crucial that it’s this human centered process, not just sort of a, you know, simplistic, no security protocol. And I think that’s when it’s most effective.
Jaclyn Schildkraut 47:22
So many great takeaways, I think, from this conversation that can really help schools think about how best to support students moving forward. Dr madfas, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks very
Eric Madfis 47:32
much, Jackie. Appreciate it.
Joel Tirado 47:37
Thanks again to Jaclyn Schildkraut and Eric Madfis for highlighting how threat assessment can be used to create a safer and more equitable environment for students. If you liked this episode, please rate, subscribe, and share. It will help others find the podcast and help us deliver the latest in public policy research. All of our episodes are available for free wherever you stream your podcasts and transcripts are available on our website. I’m Joel Tirado; until next time.
Joel Tirado 48:11
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