A white paper title “Getting Beyond A Perception of Security – A Behavioral Profiling Approach To Threat Recognition and Public Safety” has been added to our downloads section. To access it, simply visit our library and access all of our downloads. I’ve added the paper’s Executive Summary into this post to provide an overview of what you can expect.
Executive Summary
The complexities and difficulties that active shooter scenarios present to the security personnel responsible for preventing them create a perception that an active shooter event is unpreventable. This is untrue. Threat recognition is based on a person’s ability to accurately predict another person’s intentions and capabilities. This allows a person to separate the criminal from the crowd he hides amongst. With the limitations of many threat recognition programs, programs that teach people to search for indicators that change from attack to attack, security providers will continue to struggle in preventing an attack from occurring.
This white paper will discuss how a program based on behavioral analysis and assessment can overcome these limitations and empower security officers to identify an individual with violent intentions. This allows buildings, schools, companies, and law enforcement officers to focus on violence prevention, instead of just the response a violent act.
A behavioral program begins by teaching a person to accurately assess and classify an individual’s current emotional state. By understanding how the limbic system’s freeze, flight, or fight response to stress manifests itself through nonverbal communication, people can learn to quickly analyze each person in our immediate vicinity. In order to gather true insight and meaning from these observations, these observations need to be weighed against the context that surrounds them. One component of this context is through the analysis of group dynamics and interpersonal relationships. Another component is the geographical area that these individuals and groups are operating in. Essentially, behavior and body language have different meanings in public areas, such as a mall or restaurant, than they would inside that person’s home.
These four functional domains of behavior (individuals, groups, relationship with the environment, and collective mood) are principles that allow for these observations to be made around the world and applied in any setting. Each domain is backed by behavioral science to ensure these observations are ones that a person can be confident in, and that represent a true indication of a person’s intentions and capabilities.
The terminology used to define behavior allows for effective communication of observations, thus allowing an officer to retroactively justify the actions taken. In addition to facilitating report writing, communication also helps veteran officers with extensive experience mentor their less experienced peers by having the vocabulary available to explain their observations and intuitions.
Learning to read behavior is an empowering capability and complements existing security measures. Because many access control measures channel people through a single point of entrance, those people with violent intentions are mixed in with those who legitimately belong there. Behavioral analysis provides you with the ability to separate the criminal from the crowd.