Safe School Initiative: An Interim Report on the Prevention of Targeted Violence in Schools

The U.S. Secret Service has a long tradition of protecting our nation's leaders. We invest significant resources into our protective mission. A key component of protection involves threat assessment: efforts to identify, assess, and manage persons who might pose a threat of violence to our protectees. In the last few years, the Secret Service has completed an operational study of the behavior and thinking of all persons in the U.S. in the past 50 years who attacked, or tried to attack, a major national leader or public figure. This study, the Secret Service Exceptional Case Study Project (ECSP), has led us to modify and improve our approach to threat assessment. After the recent spate of school shootings in 1998 and 1999, I met with the Secretary of Education to see if the Secret Service could contribute to the prevention of these terrible attacks. We agreed that staff from the Secret Service's new National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) who had conducted the ECSP would conduct a similar operational study of school shootings. The goals of this project are to gather and analyze accurate and useful information about the behavior and thinking of young persons who commit acts of targeted violence in our nation's schools and to provide this information to school and law enforcement professionals with responsibilities to prevent targeted school violence. Over the last fourteen months, National Threat Assessment staff have been studying information about school shooters. This work has involved systematic analysis of investigative, judicial, educational, and other files, and interviews with ten school shooters (so far). While NTAC's work is not completed, we think it is appropriate to release preliminary findings from our analysis of the behavior and thinking of more than 30 school shooters. Later, we will be developing additional work products, including a threat assessment guide for those with school violence preventive responsibilities, and a series of scientific publications. My hope is that the knowledge and expertise utilized by the Secret Service to protect the President may aid our nation's school and law enforcement communities to safeguard our nation's children. We offer these preliminary findings in support of our belief that much targeted violence is potentially preventable, if thoughtful persons work together in a systematic and reasonable way.