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Pathway to Violence or Pathway to Hope? Behavioral Threat Assessment and Intervention Are Key

By Claire Meyer

4 June 2026

Human kindness is the pathway to hope. It’s an unusual message to hear from the FBI during a presentation on behavioral threat assessments, but an impactful one.

Dr. Karie Gibson, unit chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Assessment Unit (BAU), Behavioral Threat Assessment Center (BTAC), outlined during ASIS International’s inaugural North America Conference on Wednesday how security professionals can help get people off of the pathway to violence and redirect them onto a pathway to hope, leveraging the impact of small, uniquely human actions.

“We as individuals limit and sometimes do not give ourselves credit for how helpful we can be in mitigating violence,” Gibson says.

In her 11 years working with the BAU on threat assessments, Gibson has found that active mitigation of workplace violence risks is achievable, especially through interpersonal outreach, active listening, and building connection with at-risk individuals.

Even though investing in a behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM) program does cost money—and it’s always hard to prove the value of prevention—it’s worth the time and resources. People put a lot of effort and funds into target hardening, but that mainly keeps outsiders from coming in and committing violence in your organization. Without BTAM, insiders are not adequately accounted for, Gibson says.

“You would never tolerate your workers only solving 50 percent of a problem… As security professionals, why would we want to model solving only 50 percent of this problem?” she asks.

Gibson and the BAU have found that certain workplace features increase the risk of violence:

Not planning to deal with problematic employees or high-concern factors
Not training employees on risk reporting, threat assessment, or workplace violence prevention plans
Failing to enforce policies
Not providing training on warning signs, how to report them, and what to expect after a report
Ignoring complaints of bad behavior
Enabling or tolerating a toxic work environment
Failure to treat others with respect and dignity

That last point is especially important today because individuals’ resilience to weather stressors, unfair conditions, perceived slights, and workplace tensions is notably low, Gibson says.

Instead, “if we can interact with individuals with respect and dignity, we’re already ahead of the curve… If we do that, we are working toward preventing violence without even knowing it,” she adds. Failure to respect employees and other individuals exacerbates grievances rather than de-escalating them.

Even if an employee is exhibiting concerning behaviors or even showing signs of being on the pathway to violence—perhaps fixating on a grievance, ideating about violence, or starting to research or plan for an attack—organizations’ BTAM teams can intervene effectively. They can listen to warning signs, connect those dots, and then treat the person of concern as a human being, rather than solely a threat vector.

“A successful approach to this is if you think about them as a person in pain, not a monster or a threat,” Gibson says.

If security or HR teams approach the person as a monster or problematic employee, that becomes his or her identity, and it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead, recognizing the person’s struggle in an empathetic way sends the message that the person matters and that the interviewer or threat assessment professional cares and wants to help them recover.

So, what does that look like in practice? First, collect the dots before you connect the dots. During post-attack analysis, the BAU often finds silos around information sources. People have witnessed warning behaviors or signals from the assailant, but no one group collected all of those puzzle pieces together to take action. The BAU found that people of concern are 16 times more likely to escalate into an active shooter incident if they display concerning behaviors to bystanders and no one intervenes or addresses it—they are looking for off-ramps from violence, and without those signals, they push forward on the pathway to violence.

“Inaction is important,” Gibson says, reiterating the value of cross-department collaboration and reporting mechanisms for behavioral threat assessment and intervention.

In addition, those warning behaviors and triggers can evolve over time—including in predictable ways. HR personnel might have advance warning about an employee’s rocky divorce or custody battle. That should be a signal for BTAM teams to step up risk mitigators: positive, protective factors in a person of concern’s life that could prevent him or her from pursuing an act of targeted violence. Those mitigators commonly include providing nonviolent conflict resolution, facilitating access to assistance (such as mental health or social services, providing access to financial assistance with basic needs or educational assistance), sharing positive coping mechanisms, and promoting healthy social supports.

Motivations for violence are diverse, but they are often connected to the person of concern’s unmet needs for love, safety, respect, belonging, or significance, Gibson says. These people are seeking identity and purpose, and they often lack social connections that help them cope with life stressors. If they cannot make connections at work or in other healthy settings, they might turn online—where negative thoughts of violence or self-harm are often egged on by radicalizing groups, she adds.

In response, Gibson recommends looking at the person of concern’s behavior and trying to pin down what sort of unmet need the behavior is helping to fulfill. Is the behavior garnering attention or notoriety that the person wouldn’t otherwise achieve? Is it aimed at protecting the person’s job or workplace stability? Is it connected to deep-set feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, or even suicidal ideation? Is it a response to feeling shamed or humiliated in some way, and attempting to get back at the perceived source?

Answers to those questions can provide invaluable context about the level of threat the individual may pose to themselves or others, as well as point out what types of mitigators the organization can use to address those concerns.

At this stage, Gibson says she often gets pushback, with employers, security personnel, or law enforcement officers saying they are not social workers. But “you don’t need to be a social worker to be helpful,” she adds.

To catch the rest of the ASIS North America Conference, visit our the event page here.

For more resources on this topic, start with the FBI’s mass violence prevention resources, as well as the BAU’s report Making Prevention a Reality: Identifying, Assessing, and Managing the Threat of Targeted Attacks.

ASIS International has a number of resources on threat assessment and workplace violence, and many of them are available for free to ASIS members.

Workplace Violence and Active Assailant—Prevention, Intervention, and Response Standard
Essentials of Workplace Violence Prevention and Intervention Certificate Program
School Security Standard, including an annex on behavioral threat assessments

Behavioral threat assessment, crisis intervention, insider threats, and workplace violence are frequently covered topics within Security Management. Consider reading these editor’s choice articles:

Publicly Humiliating Events: A Precursor to Workplace Violence?
Terminations, disciplinary problems, and conflicts between co-workers can quickly escalate and amplify pre-existing feelings of animosity and rage.

The Importance of Planning, Communication, and Dignity in Employee Terminations
Firing an employee is already disruptive to the employee, other staff, and the organization at large. But it can also escalate from a disruption into violence.

Crisis Intervention: A Stabilizing Force
As crises continue to rise, communities are coming together to craft crisis intervention teams and programs, helping individuals of concern in a more holistic manner.

Breaking Through to Better Communication Through De-escalation
Human beings are dynamic—our moods, behaviors, and states of mind can shift rapidly depending on a myriad of factors. So, responding to humans in crisis requires agility and flexibility, as well as a healthy dose of self-awareness.

A Flock of Black Swans: Preparing for the Behavioral Consequences of a Polycrisis
Security practitioners are living in a truly dizzying operating environment, with simultaneous, overlapping crises putting their operational and personal resilience at risk.