Can threat assessment help police prevent mass public shootings? Testing an intelligence-led policing tool
Policing: An International Journal
ISSN: 1363-951X
Article publication date: 12 September 2018
Issue publication date: 4 February 2019
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine whether threat assessment, an intelligence-led policing (ILP) tool, can prevent mass public shootings.
Design/methodology/approach
In order to gauge the potential effectiveness of this ILP tool, the authors conduct a retrospective analysis of 278 mass public shootings that occurred in the USA between 1966 and 2016. This retrospective analysis allows us to determine how successful threat assessment protocols could be in preventing mass public shootings by examining how successful this tool would have been in identifying the offenders in our data.
Findings
The results show that threat assessment has the potential to be an effective tool in the ILP arsenal to identify and prevent impending mass public shootings. However, our results also point to several obstacles for the effective implementation of this ILP tool. The underreporting of threats and using the content of threats and characteristics of threateners are problematic in correctly assigning risk. The authors make suggestions for how to overcome these obstacles.
Originality/value
This study makes several contributions to the intelligence-led policing and mass murder field. This is the first study to test the potential effectiveness of an intelligence-led policing tool to prevent mass public shootings. Additionally, this is one of the first studies to examine the leaks, types, context and follow-though of threats made by mass public shooters in the United States. Consequently, it provides unique information on the foreshowing behaviors of mass public shooters.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Kyle Hubert for his help during the data collection process. The authors also like to thank the reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their insightful comments and suggestions.
Citation
Capellan, J.A. and Lewandowski, C. (2019), "Can threat assessment help police prevent mass public shootings? Testing an intelligence-led policing tool", Policing: An International Journal, Vol. 42 No. 1, pp. 16-30. https://doi.org/10.1108/PIJPSM-07-2018-0089
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited