FBI ‘threat assessment’ teams around Minnesota try to stop the next mass shooting

Throughout the year, a coterie of FBI agents, child protection workers and school psychologists gather in Minnesota to try to stop the next mass shooting — ideally before even needing to involve police.

The FBI has more than 20 of what it calls Threat Assessment Threat Management (TATM) teams across the state — and in each of the bureau’s 56 field offices nationwide — as part of the Justice Department’s answer to the historic death toll of the 2017 Las Vegas music festival shooting and the Parkland High School shooting months later.

“We’re not trying to predict behavior; we’re trying to prevent behavior,” said Patrick Rielly, a special agent who leads the program for the FBI in Minneapolis, whose office also covers the Dakotas.

Rielly, who has been the FBI’s threat management coordinator in Minnesota since 2019, said that its teams here have worked on “hundreds” of cases since then, most of which did not require a criminal justice response. He said that recently involved connecting one student whose behavior concerned his suburban metropolitan school with a chance to play baseball — something his grades had precluded earlier.

“We want people to feel like they can come forward with a loved one or with a spouse or a coworker and tell us that they’re concerned without the feeling that there’ll be retribution or that the person is just going to get arrested,” he said.

The teams seek to identify the types of behavior at various stages in the process of trying to plan and carry out attacks. If the behavior is detected early enough, law enforcement or community members may even be able to dissuade someone from their plans. That “off-ramp” work is informed by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, best known for its work studying serial killers. It draws on the unit’s six-step “pathway to violence,” a continuum that starts with a grievance and evolves into an ideology that violence is justified and needed to solve that problem.

Rielly likens his team’s work to that of a cardiologist, who looks at all the factors in heart health and draws up plans to improve problem areas before it’s too late. Rielly wants friends, relatives or colleagues concerned that someone they know is on such a path to get the team involved as soon as possible.

This might also help protect people close to a potential assailant from legal liability: Courts are increasingly finding educators, parents and others responsible for failing to protect the public.

A Michigan judge in April sentenced the first parents convicted for their role in a mass shooting to at least 10 years in prison. The judge found that Jennifer and James Crumbley did not do enough to stop their teenage son from possessing a gun used to kill four students in 2021.

Temporary workers at a Rite Aid warehouse in Maryland sued the company in 2022, alleging negligence and failure to provide adequate security in hiring and supervising a woman who shot three people dead and took her own life in 2018.

And, in 2019, a California jury awarded $3.8 million in damages to a former high school student who sued his school district for negligence in assessing the threat posed by another student who shot him in the stomach with a shotgun in 2013.

The FBI has taken an increasingly intensive role in studying active shooter cases in the country, something that now happens nearly once a week, on average.

The bureau published its latest report on such cases late last month, tallying 48 incidents in 2023 in which one or more people killed or tried to kill people in a populated area. The August 2023 shooting by two 17-year-olds that left one dead and six wounded at the “Nudieland” music venue in Minneapolis was among the cases counted.

Using the framework developed by its Behavioral Analysis Unit, the FBI calculates that if someone is in the “preparation stage” on the pathway to violence, they are anywhere from 24 hours to eight days away from attempting an attack. But an earlier step, the “research and planning stage,” can span between a week up to two years before an attack is tried.

The FBI and Justice Department are not typically involved in crimes involving juveniles. But they can convene teams such as the TATM to try to pair at-risk juveniles with community resources.

Holly Ryan, a threat assessment specialist and child psychologist for Lakeville Area Schools, said that such interventions are preferable to expulsion — something that may sometimes worsen the problem.

Matthew Stephenson, a child protective services social worker for Washington County, said in many cases, he sees backdrops of family trauma or violence, substance abuse and possible child abuse or neglect.

“A lot of times we’ve already had open cases when some of these things are kind of brewing and we’ve already collected some of this information that law enforcement is looking for,” Stephenson said.

Finding a sense of community and belonging has helped in Ryan’s most difficult cases, she said. But Ryan said Minnesota does not mandate threat assessment in K-12 public schools, leaving districts without a common set of best practices.

“They don’t have the training, they don’t have the expertise, they don’t have the tools, they don’t have the team set up. So they’re calling and asking for help,” said Ryan, whose community did fund additional safety and security measures for its school district in 2019. “There’s still kind of the potential to show other corners of the state and even the metro what’s possible,” she added. “The problem is that without a mandate to do it, everybody’s just reinventing the wheel.”

It’s not always possible to disrupt a plot without law enforcement, said Rielly, who added that the further one goes on the pathway continuum, the more likely the person has already committed a crime.

Federal prosecutors earlier this year flew in a supervisor from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit to testify before sentencing for a 21-year-old Savage man convicted of trying to buy machine gun parts from an informant. River William Smith — sentenced to nearly 7 years in federal prison in January — was also caught repeatedly supporting Nazi paramilitary groups and the mass killings of law enforcement, the LGBTQ community and Muslims.

Karie Gibson, a supervisory special agent who works for the unit, said that those who commit acts of targeted violence often follow a trajectory of “discernible steps” observable to people around them.

“And we also know that they don’t snap,” she testified in January. “They consider, plan and prepare, and it’s a very methodical process.”

Prosecutors in Minnesota said a concerned citizen at a south metro gun range alerted law enforcement to Smith’s behavior, which included running through drills at the range in which he fired large volumes of ammunition while wearing a “Punisher” mask popularized by domestic extremists.

Jordan Kushner, Smith’s attorney, challenged Gibson’s testimony about the FBI’s threat assessment methodology and suggested that anyone could have a grievance without being at risk of mass murder.

“Probably 100 percent of us have grievances, don’t we?” Kushner asked.

“Well, the reality is it’s not just about the grievance, it’s about the totality of factors,” Gibson responded. “So, many people will have a grievance, but you don’t see the action towards wanting to resolve that grievance through violence unless they are committed to that pathway of targeted violence.”