Faith-Based Daily Awareness Post 3 July 2025

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. 

Stopping Vehicles Before They Become Weapons at Church

The Christian Warrior Training article provides proactive strategies that can be beneficial for all faith-based communities to help mitigate the threat of a vehicle ramming incident. While vehicles are commonly used to attack crowds, they can still be a threat to facilities, and this article provides excellent considerations for how to select the proper physical barriers.

Key considerations for bollard selection include:

• High-threat or high-traffic areas: Use crash-rated bollards at main entrances, drop-off zones, and exposed sidewalks where vehicles could accelerate.
• Low-speed or low-risk zones: Decorative bollards may suffice where aesthetics matter and the likelihood of a vehicle threat is minimal, but only if they’re supplemented by natural or structural barriers.

Analyst Comments: There are obviously many considerations when deciding how best to secure the perimeter of a house of worship. Everything from threat assessments, avenues of approach, compliance, and budget are all considerations security teams need to consider. For organizations that have not yet fortified some of their potentially high-risk areas are encouraged to review this article.

United States Secret Service Special Virtual Event: Return to School 2025

In anticipation of the Fall 2025 return to school, the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) will host a virtual event to highlight the Center’s latest release, titled Aligning Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management with a Multi-tiered System of Support: Building a Continuum of Prevention and Intervention. NTAC’s newest publication was published in partnership with the Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and focuses on how education practitioners can best align BTAM programs alongside multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) in K-12 schools. This event will further highlight key findings and implications from NTAC’s decades of research and guidance on school violence prevention.

This free virtual event is appropriate for educators, school and district administrators, counselors, school psychologists, BTAM team members and coordinators, MTSS and PBIS leadership teams, state education agency personnel, law enforcement officers, and other school safety partners.

Event Date: August 13, 2025

Event Time: 12:00 pm – 2:30 pm EST

Register here.