SJA hears from Cynthia Marble, Senior Director, Executive Protection Practice at Ontic, on how organizations can connect behavioral signals to better manage emerging risks.
When news broke of the shooting at 345 Park Avenue, security professionals immediately shifted into investigator mode.
What happened? Why did it happen? How did the incident unfold? Were there warning signs? How quickly was the threat identified? Were emergency procedures effective? And perhaps most importantly, what lessons can be learned to reduce the likelihood of something similar happening again?
These are important questions, and they are the questions traditional security programs are designed to answer.
Access control systems, alarms, emergency communications and response plans remain foundational to protecting people and facilities.
They help organizations detect threats, respond to incidents and recover afterward.
Incidents like 345 Park Avenue also serve as a reminder that violence is often preceded by behaviors, grievances and warning signs that emerge long before a crisis reaches the response stage.
While every case is different, security leaders routinely ask the same question after a serious incident: Were there indicators that, viewed collectively, might have warranted closer attention sooner?
Traditional reactive security protocols are designed to detect, delay and respond to threats.
Threat assessment focuses on something different: investigating concerning behavior before a threat materializes.
At its core, threat assessment is not a mysterious methodology, it is an investigation.
The objective is to gather information, understand context, identify patterns and determine how to manage the situation.
Consider a scenario many security leaders will find familiar: An employee leaves an organization following a difficult separation.
During the offboarding process, their manager notes that the individual appears upset and remains fixated on what they believe was unfair treatment.
While the behavior stands out, nothing seems threatening.
Strong emotional responses to unexpected departures are common.
Several weeks later, a current employee mentions seeing a series of social media posts from the individual criticizing the company and its leadership.
The comments are negative and occasionally personal, but they contain no direct threats.
A month or two later, HR receives an email challenging the circumstances surrounding the individual’s departure and requesting reconsideration of certain decisions.
Around the same time, a manager learns that the former employee has contacted several current employees to continue discussing the issue.
Viewed independently, none of these events may warrant significant concern.
A manager sees a disgruntled former employee. HR sees someone struggling to move on from a workplace dispute.
Current employees see social media activity.
What makes scenarios like this one difficult is that risk rarely reveals itself through a single incident. It becomes visible when separate observations begin to form a pattern.
A proactive security posture grounded in behavioral threat assessment investigation helps organizations move beyond isolated incidents and evaluate behavior in context.
By identifying patterns and connecting information from multiple sources, organizations can determine whether a situation is evolving in a way that warrants closer attention.
The goal is not to predict violence, but to understand risk well enough to make informed decisions before a situation escalates.
Most organizations already possess much of the information needed to identify emerging risk patterns.
The question is whether that information is reaching the right people and is continuously reviewed as circumstances change.
Organizations that do this well tend to focus on a few fundamentals:
For security leaders, a useful exercise is to examine how concerns move through the organization today.
If the hypothetical scenario described earlier unfolded within your organization, would the relevant information come together in a way that allowed someone to recognize the pattern? Or would it remain scattered across email inboxes, case files, spreadsheets and individual observations?
The purpose of these investigations is not simply to determine whether someone poses a threat. It is to understand what is happening well enough to determine the appropriate response.
In many cases, when threat assessment is done right, the most effective response has little to do with traditional security measures.
Consider the hypothetical example above.
Once the organization has a clearer understanding of the situation, it may determine that the former employee simply needs a better opportunity to express concerns about their departure or better understand what support remains available to them moving forward.
The appropriate intervention will depend on the circumstances, but the objective remains the same: identify concerns early enough to influence the outcome.
The sooner a situation is recognized and understood, the more options an organization has to engage constructively, provide support and reduce risk before it escalates.
Incidents such as the shooting at 345 Park Avenue naturally focus attention on response, recovery and lessons learned. Equally important, however, are the situations that never become public incidents at all.
The most successful threat assessment cases rarely receive attention because they are identified early, evaluated appropriately and addressed before they escalate.
Most organizations have invested heavily in the capabilities needed to respond to a crisis.
The opportunity now is to place the same emphasis on recognizing risk before a crisis develops.
Organizations that can identify concerning behavior early, investigate it in context and act when necessary are often in the strongest position to prevent escalation.
In many ways, the work is not fundamentally different from any other investigation.
The difference is timing.
Instead of examining what happened after a crisis, organizations are connecting the signals early enough to get ahead of a potential situation.