Faith-Based Daily Awareness Post 13 July 2023

These updates are shared to help raise the situational awareness of Faith-Based organizations to best defend against, and mitigate the impacts from all-hazards threats including physical security, cybersecurity, and natural disasters.

Enhancing School Safety Using Behavioral Threat Assessment. In anticipation of the Fall 2023 return to school, the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) will host a virtual presentation highlighting key findings and implications from its decades of research on school violence. In this training, NTAC’s social scientists will discuss the backgrounds, thinking, and behaviors of school attackers and how some schools have discovered and stopped plots before violence occurred. This free virtual event is appropriate for educators, administrators, counselors and mental health professionals, law enforcement officers, and other school safety stakeholders.

• Event date: August 24, 2023
• Event time: 12:00-3:00 PM EST

 Analyst Comment:

The Covent School Shooting shows that Faith-Based schools are not immune to active shooters. The United States Secret Service (USSS) has done extensive research on all types of mass-casualty attacks, not just active shooters. The above virtual presentation should provide valuable information for preventing an attack. The USSS has developed extensive preparedness and mitigation resources, such as their Improving School Safety Through Bystander Reporting | United States Secret Service and Mass Attacks in Public spaces: 2016-2020. More reports and resources can be found at their Public Safety web page.

A possible attacker’s behaviors and planning methods can also be found in Gate 15’s White Paper: The Hostile Event Attack Cycle (HEAC), 2021 Update (gate15.global).