Threats, threat assessment, and threat assessment training. There is a lot wrapped into these terms. Threats vary based on what we are trying to protect.

Threat assessment means different things to different people. Law enforcement, security professionals, military personnel, and school counselors all conduct threat assessments, but in different ways.

The type of threat assessment you need varies based on the type of problem you are trying to solve. In some cases, you might hire a professional to conduct the assessment, who then provides you with the results.

Threat Assessment Approaches

Let’s take a moment and revisit the different threat assessment approaches. Threat assessment can include:

• Security Threat Risk Assessment: Plan for and protect facilities and critical infrastructure in your community against terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and other threats;

• Cyber-Security Threat Risk Assessment: Protect your computer networks, systems, and servers from attacks by malicious actors;

• Threat Assessment for Instrumental Violence: Identify, assess, and intervene with a person who may commit targeted or instrumental violence (e.g., a school shooting);

• Violence-Threat Risk Assessment: Assess the likelihood of a specific individual for general violent behavior and dangerousness; and

• Active Threat Assessment: Identify and react to threatening individuals in real-time such as active shooters, terrorists, or other threats.

If you are unsure what type of threat assessment you need, review our Guide to Threat Assessment Approaches for law enforcement or our companion post for security professionals. These are great resources for anyone who has to assess threats, and can help you identify what type of threat assessment you need.

Your Threat Problem

The different threat assessment approaches will help your personnel in different ways, and the approach you choose should be tailored to your specific needs.

Let’s take active shooter threat assessment training. Each threat assessment approach is important to preventing an active shooter incident, but in different ways. Take a look at the figure below to see how the different threat assessment approaches apply to the prevention of active shooter incidents.

This figure is more fully explained in our blog post, Threat Assessment and Active Shooter Prevention, but let’s quickly focus on two threat assessment approaches and their relevance to active shooter incidents.

Security Risk Threat Assessment is environmental and involves identifying and protecting a specific location from threats (such as an active shooter). It could include recommendations such as improving access control and surveillance.

The individually-focused Violence Threat Risk Assessment is a long-term and short-term approach that involves assessing people who have a general propensity toward dangerous behavior. It is not tied to the commission of a specific violent act, but rather to the person in general.

Perhaps thinking about these approaches will help you identify resources that can keep your personnel and communities safer.

Active Threat Assessment Training

Your personnel will regularly face situations where they need to quickly and reliably recognize the signs of active threat. This can often mean the difference between life and death. Active threat assessment is a methodology that emphasizes systematic observation of behaviors and actions to help recognize the signs associated with a potential, imminent, or immediate threat.

As part of this threat assessment methodology, trainees learn how to systematically observe their environment, identify potentially suspicious individuals (or persons of interest), and assess the extent that a person of interest (POI) is a threat. A POI is an individual who becomes a target for closer observation due to their suspicious activity, lack of an explainable objective, or display of threatening behavior. Once identified, a POI might become a focus for further observation or interdiction.

Identifying the extent that the POI is a threat requires continuous assessment of threat indicators, which are verbal or visual behaviors that an individual exhibits when they are being deceptive, threatening, trying to hide in plain sight, or carrying contraband or weapons. This process allows for the identification of active threats.

Second Sight offers both online and instructor-led training for law enforcement and security professionals in active threat assessment and interdiction training. We also provide situational awareness for anyone interested in personal safety.

We recently developed the 4-hour Threat Observation course to make our observation methodologies more readily available to law enforcement and security professionals. Check out our course offerings for more details.

Our 8-hour online Threat Awareness for Law Enforcement program is certified through IADLEST’s National Certification Program. As an ASIS International Preferred Provider, all of our courses can be used to meet continuing education requirements.

Threat Assessment Training from Observation to Interdiction

As active threat assessment training involves interacting with people, it is important to consider the human interaction and safety components associated with an interdiction.

We use the Spectrum of Interactions as guide for our threat assessment training. These stages of interaction reflect the extent that a subject believes they are under surveillance by law enforcement or other authority figure. There are five stages of interaction: unthreatened, authorities present but not watching, authorities present and watching, initial contact with authorities, and interdiction.

To learn more about the spectrum of interactions, check out our blog post: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.

Stress Inoculation and Training

Ensuring trainees know how to appropriately use tools in stressful situations is an important part of any training program. Exposure to high-stress scenarios evokes a biological stress response that can impact performance, but proper training can override this effect. This is especially true when the training is conducted in a high-pressure environment.

Per psychological research, exposure to stressful situations serves as a form of “inoculation” that may improve one’s reactions and performance when under stress. In other words, people who have more experience dealing with stressful situations are often better prepared to effectively use their skills in stressful (and dangerous) situations.  

For more information about stress inoculation, see our post: Why Experience Matters.

Instructor-led, Online, and Blended Training

There are three general types training – instructor-led, online, and blended. You might be less familiar with blended learning, which involves a mix of online and instructor-led training. The method depends on the type of training you need. You can’t learn to shoot online, but you can learn the parts of the firearm, steps for cleaning it, safety precautions, and tips for the shooting range.

Online and in-person learning tend to achieve statistically equivalent learning outcomes, as evidenced in a recent 2021 meta-analysis as well as a 2010 meta-analysis by the Department of Education.

Online training also offers a number of benefits. It can save time and money. It can be used to target a geographically remote workforce where people work on different shifts. It offers a consistent message that can be delivered the same way every time. Trainees’ performance and course feedback can be evaluated more easily.  Depending on the program, trainees may be able to refer back to the materials when doing their job.

You can read a more in-depth review of the pros and cons of the different types of training in our blog post: Should All Training Be Online?

A Formalized Instructional Design

The research emphasizes the importance of good instructional design to ensure the best outcomes. Instructional design is a formalized process of course creation that allows for the development of rigorous, consistent, and effective training. There are many different models of instructional design. Though, most of them are iterative and cyclical, requiring constant data collection, evaluation, and revisions. It makes me think about the intelligence cycle.

You can learn more about instructional design in active threat assessment training in our blog post: The Second Time Should Be Better.

Training Scars: An Ounce of Prevention

One of the goals of training is to improve how your personnel do their jobs – to make them more effective and safer. Regretfully though, sometimes training can teach bad habits that increase risk. This is known as a training scar. In the law enforcement training community, training scars are especially problematic when the training relates to high-risk situations, such as  police firearms training.

A common example of a training scar is when officers are trained to re-holster their weapon after firing three rounds. Later, when this occurs during a high-risk encounter, a trained officer may automatically re-holster his weapon regardless of whether the target is down or not. This training scar puts safety at risk. Thankfully, there are a variety of methods that trainers use to overcome training scars or to prevent them from occurring in the first place.

Training Evaluation & Threat Assessment Training

Through the instructional design process, instructors should have discernable goals and a clear understanding of the real-world skill they are trying to impart. These benchmarks allow for an evaluation – to determine if the instruction did what it was supposed to do, and if the new skills impact trainees’ performance while on the job.

The Kirkpatrick model has been a highly-cited and widely-influential foundation for thinking about training evaluations. In this model, there are four different levels of evaluation. They include:

Level 1: Reaction – what trainees say about their experience;

Level 2: Learning - what measurable changes can we attribute to success;

Level 3: Behavior - how well trainees perform their job; and

Level 4: Results – to what extent the program has brought the sponsoring organization closer to its goal (e.g., more proactive stops, decreases in crime).

Collecting and analyzing data gets more difficult as you move from Level 1 to Level 4. Reaction data is the easiest to obtain and analyze, and is a good starting point to training evaluation. Learning data is a little harder to analyze, but can be easily collected using an online platform. You can learn more about Level 1 evaluation data in our blog post on evaluating reactions to training. To learn more about Level 2 data, you can also check out our post on measuring threat assessment skills.

Who Should Get Trained in Active Threat Assessment?

Any person whose mission involves observing or interacting with the public could benefit from active threat assessment training. This includes (but is not limited to) patrol officers driving through the communities they protect, security personnel watching surveillance cameras, and border patrol and transportation security officers who protect our borders and airports.

Active threat assessment training can also benefit school safety personnel. In the year 2020-21, there were a total of 93 school shootings with casualties – the highest number since 2000-01. These commonplace occurrences have prompted some school districts to put police officers in schools (i.e., school resource officers) or hire security personnel.

Active threat assessment training can help school security personnel identify students who may be a threat (to support intervention) AND protect against external threats.

Read more about active threat assessment training and schools in our blog post: Threat Assessment Training for Schools.

Benefits of Active Threat Assessment Training

Active threat assessment is the backbone of being an effective law enforcement or security professional. This is a proficiency that is not gained easily, and training is a necessity for most. Second Sight can fill that gap.  We will teach your personnel to be better observers and to better identify threats in any type of environment. This will also better prepare them to craft an informed plan to interdict with potential threats.  

Do not just listen to us when we tell you that our course is effective. Listen to our students. Out of a sample of 104 LEOs and 212 security personnel who took this course, 98% felt that the course would help them do their jobs better, improve their abilities to identify suspicious persons, and help them better articulate their decisions. This course will not only keep your personnel (and others) safe but help them better explain their actions.

Learn More About Active Threat Assessment Training

Take our free 30-minute Introduction to Active Threat Assessment course or purchase one of our more advanced classes.