Focusing
on Violence Before It Happens
LOS ANGELES - In the days
after the elementary school massacre in
They checked in with a
16-year-old boy with a fondness for bomb-making chemicals who, two years
before, told them, “I have to get rid of the bad people in this world,” and
described a “special plan” he said he would put into action in a few years.
They called the mother of
another teenager, they have nicknamed him “Jared Loughner,”
after the man who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords
in
They contacted a
20-year-old who in 2010 was fantasizing about killing members of his family and
carrying out a shooting at school.
The young men had been
brought to the attention of the School Threat Assessment Response Team program
overseen by Dr. Beliz, one of the most intensive
efforts in the nation to identify the potential for school violence and take
steps to prevent it. The program, an unusual collaboration involving county
mental health professionals, law enforcement agencies and schools, was
developed by the Los Angeles Police Department in 2007, after the shooting
rampage at
In the national debate
that has followed the killings at
“When we looked at kids
who had committed attacks, the vast majority had come to the attention of an
adult for a behavior that was concerning but would not necessarily cause
someone to conclude they were planning an attack,” said Bryan M. Vossekuil, former executive director of the National
Threat Assessment Center, part of the Secret Service, and a co-author of a 2002
guide to threat assessment in schools published by the service and the federal
Education Department.
Many secondary schools
and universities around the country have protocols for dealing with students
who threaten violence. And cities besides
“I think
Each day, several dozen
calls come in to the program’s dispatch center from principals, counselors,
school security officers or parents worried about students who have talked
about suicide, exhibited bizarre behavior or made outright threats.
“We’ll go to a school,
evaluate the individual there, then what we’ll also do is go to the kid’s home
and we’ll ask to see the bedroom and we’ll do a very data-driven assessment,”
Dr. Beliz said. “We’re trying to figure out, what are
the triggers here? What are the risk factors? What’s really going on and how
can we intervene?”
He and others involved in
the program said that in more than a few cases, the approach had been
successful in heading off violence.
Part of the challenge,
Dr. Beliz said, has been educating school
administrators and mental health professionals about their legal
responsibilities and the exceptions in federal privacy laws that allow
information to be shared in exigent circumstances, for example, when a threat
is involved. Schools and mental health practitioners are often reluctant to
release any information to county officials or law enforcement officers,
believing incorrectly that the law prevents disclosure under any circumstances.
Another difficulty has
been convincing school administrators whose first impulse is often to expel
students who have made threats, even empty ones, that doing so only pushes the
problem onto another school or leaves a child at home with free time to surf
the Internet and nurse a grudge against the school.
What we do is, we work
with the school to think that through,” Dr. Beliz
said, adding that one of their goals “is to keep the kid in school, because
that is their holding environment.”
Depending on the
situation, a student who has made a serious threat might be put on a 72-hour
mental health hold, or arrested, if a crime has been committed. A mental health
hold is often preferable, law enforcement officers said, because under
Detective Charles
Dempsey, the officer in charge for the L.A.P.D.’s
part of the program, said that in most cases, parents consent to letting field
teams of clinicians and trained law enforcement officers look in a student’s
bedroom or search through backpacks and notebooks. “We get a lot of cooperation
from parents,” he said. “After the initial shock, they want to know, too, what
did I miss?”
If a case is converted to
a criminal investigation, the procedures become more regimented. During a
recent week, Dr. Beliz’s team looked into the case of
a high school student who had been overheard talking about a school shooting, in
a notebook, he had scribbled, “Kill Everyone Leave None Alive,” next to
drawings of a bomb hitting a building. They evaluated a 19-year-old who had
posted on Facebook photos of himself holding a gun
with the words “School - Tomorrow,” and a 14-year-old girl who said she
respected Adam Lanza, the gunman in Newtown, because
by killing 20 children he had saved them from the misery of life.
At a recent morning
meeting to discuss current cases, the team members reviewed the students’
history, statements, actions and family dynamics and came up with an assessment
of the seriousness of the threats, judging whether a student was “on a path to
violence,” as Dr. Beliz puts it, or instead was
experiencing emotional difficulties unlikely to erupt into violent behavior.
“If a child’s really
depressed and has been bullied and is feeling on the fringes and nobody’s doing
anything, they say, ‘I’m going to bring a gun to school and shoot up the
school,’ and suddenly everybody is paying attention,” said Linda Boyd, the
program manager for the threat assessment team.
In most cases, the more
the team finds out, the less worrisome the case becomes. In the three recent
cases, the students, upon further investigation, were judged in need of various
kinds of help but not to pose a risk of imminent violence. But Ms. Boyd said
that the team had also dealt with students who had made hit lists or been
discovered with caches of weapons:knives
and guns, but also crossbows and bombs.
“There are some kids that
we end up being really, really, really worried about,” Ms. Boyd said. Dr. Beliz noted that some school gunmen, Mr. Lanza, for example, have already left school when they turn
to violence, and that such cases are the most difficult to identify and
prevent.
“We’ll stay with these
people as long as we can, and it makes a difference, because we’re knocking on
their door or their therapist’s door,” he said. “That’s the missing piece in
some of these school shootings. They were in engaged in some sort of way, but
dropped out and no one really thought to follow them.”
Yet the concern for
community safety can bump against individual rights, especially when no crime
has been committed. At a recent case meeting, Dr. Beliz
and his team discussed a worrisome high school senior who had made serious
threats in school and was now applying to colleges. Could they notify the
university where the student eventually enrolled about his behavior? It was,
they agreed, murky legal territory.
By Erica Goode