‘The business of prevention’ bestchange официальный сайт

But a profiler’s ultimate – and most elusive – goal is to recognize behavioral patterns and stop a crime before it even starts.

That was Molly Amman’s job at the Behavioral Threat Assessment Center within the FBI. Though she has since retired from the bureau and now works as a private consultant, Amman said that goal has never wavered.

“I’m in the business of prevention,” she said. “That’s all I do is try to assess, mitigate and prevent acts of targeted violence.”

Amman said her work focused on researching, analyzing and training the community to spot what the FBI calls “pre-attack behaviors” – the sometimes-subtle warning signs that a person could soon commit an act of violence.

Over the past four or so decades, Amman said, researchers have assembled “a picture of what we think more or less captures the universe of known pre-attack behaviors.”

Whether it’s a stalker, an active shooter, or a family annihilator, Amman said criminology researchers and the FBI have found that behaviors – like fixating on a perceived grievance or potential victim, or informing a third party of the intent to commit a violent crime – “hold true across multiple contexts of murder.”

“So now that we understand that, we are out training police departments and security people and school professionals – whoever we can get – on these pre-attack warning behaviors and what they mean.”

When a person of concern is flagged to law enforcement or consultants like Amman, they quickly assess the risk of imminent violence and look for ways to intervene to manage or reduce the threat, she said.

“The devil is in the details,” she said. “Some warning behaviors are more closely correlated with violence and even imminence of violence than others, and so that’s where your training comes into play.”

Options for intervention range from monitoring the person or hardening a target like a school, Amman said, or, in more extreme cases, invoking red flag laws or involuntarily committing someone.

But always, the goal is to intervene and interrupt the ramp-up to violence. And success is often inconspicuous.

“Your next question might be, ‘Well, how many times has that prevented violence?’ And my answer is always going to be, ‘I don’t know because we can’t prove what never happened,’” Amman said.

“My experience has been that … if we can identify those behaviors and recognize that this is someone who needs assistance … then we can change the course of events.

“And that’s what it’s all about.”