Police tactical units are increasingly being used to address violent crime and homicides, particularly in major cities. Many police tactical units use place-based policing strategies, such as hot spot policing and third-party policing, that focus on proactively targeting places where crime is highly concentrated. These strategies are data-driven and use information from past crimes to predict and prepare for potential future incidents.

Here at Second Sight, we enjoy giving back to our community. As part of this effort, we partner with the Zone 5 Police Training Academy in upstate New York to provide free training on active threat assessment. Our program is now a permanent part of their curriculum, and we’d like to share it with you too. In this post, we will discuss a bit more about the training and introduce you to our online version of the course.

Violent acts on school property pose serious risks to our nation’s most vulnerable, presenting very real concerns for those tasked with keeping our schools safe. Many of these attacks are pre-planned and are often preceded by multiple warning signs. School behavioral threat assessment can help identify these warning signs so that necessary action can be taken to prevent tragedies from occurring. In this post, we describe the benefits of school behavioral threat assessment and will introduce you to an evidence-based model program that you can adapt for your jurisdiction.

Lethal and non-lethal violent acts on school property are becoming more and more common, ranging from the most horrific shooting events to schoolyard fights. In this post, we will describe school threat assessment and the challenges associated with school safety. Also included are resources on critical topics. Lastly, we describe how active threat assessment and situational awareness training can help school personnel prevent violence.

The type of threat assessment you need may vary based on the type of problem you are trying to solve. In this post, we share various research and resources related to threat assessment training and our own active threat assessment methodology.

Over the years, we have thoroughly appreciated the helpful feedback received from our trainees. We take this feedback seriously and have made critical updates to enhance our online courses. These updates focus on improving course delivery and quality of course content to make the material more engaging and to improve learning outcomes. These updates include 1) More videos to cater to different learning styles, 2) Upgrades to the course interface and navigation, and 3) Improved audio and video quality.

Active threat assessment is an observation methodology that can help you identify threatening individuals or groups who require immediate attention while dismissing people who don’t present a true threat. This method involves systematic observations, recognizing people who deviate from the pattern of consistent behavior, and identifying persons of interest (POI) who warrant further investigation. This methodology can also help you assess threat indicators, which can help you conduct safe and effective interdictions with POIs when necessary.

As the prevalence of active shooter incidents continues to increase, the need for active shooter prevention and preparedness is becoming more relevant. There are a number of things that organizations can do to prepare for and respond to these types of incidents. Some are proactive and focus on active shooter prevention, while others are short-term and help officers better respond to these incidents. For example, threat assessment can be used to identify different threats that come up at different points in time. In this post, we explain some of these options and help you find resources that might help you.

There are a number of police responses to persons with mental illness (PMI) that are designed to make encounters with them less dangerous for everyone involved. These include police and mental health collaborations and police-specific responses. In this post, we will describe these approaches as well as provide additional resources on the various approaches. We will also introduce active threat assessment, integration of this approach into police training can teach officers how to differentiate between threatening and non-threatening individuals and situations

Police tactical units are being increasingly used to address violent crime and homicides in the United States. There are a variety of police tactical units that target specific places and people, ideally so that officers can focus on the most dangerous individuals. Some strategies are proactive and can enhance an officer’s awareness regarding a certain place or person in advance, while other strategies help an officer assess a situation in real-time. Active threat assessment training is one way to enhance police tactical units, as it can be integrated as an additional layer of officer decision-making in terms of focusing on the most dangerous offenders.

The concept of ‘de-escalation’ is becoming more prominent among law enforcement professionals, but the term still means different things to different people. Generally, de-escalation techniques focus on reducing the immediacy of threat in potentially volatile encounters, ideally so that officers can resolve incidents without using force. However, it can sometimes be difficult to know when it is appropriate to de-escalate versus when doing so might be unsafe. Thankfully, threat assessment and other techniques can be utilized to help an officer estimate the risk to his safety. This post outlines the common de-escalation techniques used in law enforcement today and what we know about them.

In this interview with Mike Hodges and Brine Hamilton of the Proactive Security Podcast, Pete Forth and Nathan Meehan of Second Sight discuss the active threat assessment methodology and its application to healthcare security.

Recently, a Second Sight trainee used the active threat assessment techniques to spot people carrying concealed weapons at a peaceful protest. Read this story.

There are a number of training approaches recommended to heal police-community tensions, including procedural justice, implicit bias, de-escalation, and CIT. These approaches involve assessment, decision-making, and communication. In the second of this two-part series, we focus on de-escalation and crisis intervention training.

Second Sight Training Systems is excited to announce that we have been approved as a Preferred Provider by ASIS International. ASIS certified security professionals can to use our courses to meet continuing education requirements for the APP, CPP, PCI, and PSP Security Certifications.

There are a number of training approaches recommended to heal police-community tensions, including procedural justice, implicit bias, de-escalation, and CIT. These approaches involve assessment, decision-making, and communication. In the first of this two-part series, we focus on procedural justice and implicit bias training.

Situational awareness is a key ingredient to keeping you safe. Learn more about the how and the why of personal safety awareness training. Limit your opportunity to be a victim.

In this interview on the Managing Violence podcast, Joe Saunders and Nathan Meehan discuss the origin of active threat assessment, systematic observation, and ways of identifying potential threats.