In Everett, Washington in 2018, a young man planned an attack on his high school. He had drawn up plans to shoot students and use explosives at the school. Fortunately, his grandmother read his plan before he carried it out. She contacted authorities, who, following an investigation that uncovered a rifle and several hand grenades, arrested the 18-year-old. The individual is now serving a 22-year sentence for attempted murder.

Such instances of averted school violence, while chilling to learn about, represent a success story from one important perspective: The plan was short-circuited and never came to fruition, saving human lives and suffering. How can we learn from these averted school attacks? How can this sort of information be used to create safer schools?

To answer these and other questions, we asked Dr. Frank Straub, the Senior Director of Violence Prevention Research and Programs at Safe and Sound Schools to respond. Previously, Dr. Straub served as the founder and director of the National Policing Institute’s Center for Targeted Violence Prevention where he developed the Averted School Violence (ASV) Database. Dr. Straub also served for over 30 years in federal, state, and local law enforcement, leading agencies in New York, Indiana, and the State of Washington. During his time with the New York City Police Department, he was Deputy Commissioner of Training and Assistant Commissioner for Counterterrorism. He is the author of numerous publications on averted school violence and many other topics, including, A Comparison of Averted and Completed School Attacks from the Police Foundation Averted School Violence Database.

Why should we study averted acts of violence against schools?

The rationale behind Safe and Sound Schools’ Averted School Violence Project is that we can learn about how and why intended school attacks were stopped. By studying such averted school attacks, we can better identify failure points in safety systems, recognize those policies and practices that may have led to a foiled act, and thereby invest more wisely in school safety. From a practical standpoint, averted incidents occur more frequently than completed attacks, giving us a bigger sample to learn from. We identify and analyze completed attacks as well. The ultimate goal, of course, is to prevent future attacks.

Any surprises when comparing completed versus averted acts of school violence?

Surprisingly, our data indicate more similarities than differences when we study averted and completed targeted school attacks. For example, averted and completed attacks occur with more frequency in suburban and rural communities than in urban communities. Public high schools with less than 2,000 students are the most frequent targets of current or recently former students, ages 14–18, who plan or carry out targeted school attacks.

One critical difference between averted and completed attacks is how leakage is handled. Leakage occurs when others know about the planned attack before it occurs because the intended perpetrator has told someone, posted a threat online, and so on. Unfortunately, in completed acts, either this leakage was not reported, or if it was reported, no one acted on it. As we are learning from averted incidents, as in the example from Washington above, leakage did lead to the planned attack being foiled. Maybe it was a friend, a family member, or another student, but someone reported this leakage to the local or school police, or to educators, so that someone intervened.

One of the “surprises” we are seeing now is that persons planning targeted school attacks are getting younger, and more and more of the planners are engaged in online extremist and/or violent ideology.

We caution, however, that the ASV data is based on incidents we identify in the public domain (usually news reports or social media) or that educators or others in the school community report to us. We know we are missing instances of school violence that were averted but went unreported, which is why we want to really encourage publicity of the database and increase reporting.

What insights does the ASV data provide for school-based behavioral threat assessment teams?

Behavioral threat assessment teams are critical to identifying high-risk/high-need students and preventing targeted school attacks. One of the important lessons we’ve learned is that behavioral threat assessment teams represent the first step in what can be a long process of intervention and management of high-risk adolescents in a community context. These multi-disciplinary behavioral threat assessment and management teams have an opportunity to identify concerning behaviors, intervene, and therefore stop intended acts of violence.

But what is concerning? What should get their attention? ASV provides critical information regarding the motivations, behaviors, and methods of persons who planned and or completed the more than 300 incidents of school violence recorded in the database. It’s a good source of information on the types of behaviors that intended attackers were exhibiting on their pathway to violence.

How has the ASV data been used to address needs?

We learned from our data on averted and completed school violence that the high-risk/high-need student that comes to the attention of a behavioral threat assessment team has to be managed in the community as well as the school. Even more critically, these individuals can be lost between systems—school, mental health, law enforcement, juvenile/criminal justice, and other agencies—particularly when they leave school and fall from everyone’s radar.

These data, in part, led to a new program, Prevent 2 Protect, a collaborative effort by Michigan State University’s Department of Psychiatry and Safe and Sound Schools to prevent adolescent involvement in school violence. In Michigan, high-risk/high-need students identified by school behavioral threat assessment and management teams can be referred to Prevent 2 Protect. If the student meets our criteria, they receive a full psychiatric evaluation, an in-depth assessment of criminogenic factors, and a needs assessment. The student and their families receive an individualized care plan and then work with our community-based intensive support teams—a case manager and a mentor—who help the student and their caregivers navigate support and intervention systems longitudinally. We are thrilled that the state of Michigan has invested in providing this program to its state’s educational community for the next five years.

How can schools and police departments contribute to the ASV database?

School personnel, law enforcement, mental health practitioners, students, parents, and other members of school communities can enter an incident into the Averted School Violence Database. Reports can be made anonymously, or the persons can provide contact information, which allows the ASV team to follow up (confidentially) and obtain additional information.

What barriers are you facing in this work?

Funding has posed challenges over the years. However, we have received increasing financial support from the Motorola Solutions Foundation. Michigan State University’s Prevent 2 Protect project is also providing financial support through September 2027. The funding has allowed us to rebuild the website and database, which will facilitate user access and improve data analysis and reporting.

Increasing the number of averted incidents reported to the database by practitioners in the field remains a challenge. Most of the incidents were identified by the ASV team in the media or in social media.

What can the Justice and Prevention Research Center (JPRC) do?

The JPRC can continue to help promote the Averted School Violence project and encourage members of school communities to report incidents of averted and completed school attacks to the database. This article is a great start. We also welcome the JPRC as a research partner as we move ahead to make schools and communities safer.

December 7, 2023

Native or Indigenous persons are overrepresented in justice system involvement. For example, Indigenous persons are disproportionately overrepresented at each stage of the system process, including arrest and incarceration, whether juvenile or adult. Despite progress in reducing the total number of incarcerated populations, the overrepresentation of Native and Indigenous persons in the system, particularly when compared to white persons, remains resilient. How can these disparities for Native persons be addressed?

To answer this and other questions, we asked William Thorne, retired Utah Court of Appeals Judge and a member of the Pomo/Coast Miwok Tribe, to respond. Judge Thorne is a member of the WestEd Board of Directors and serves on the Board of Trustees for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. In 2016, Judge Thorne was presented with the Distinguished Service Award by the National Center for State Courts. You can learn more about his reputation and years of service from an article marking his retirement from the courts.

What impact did structural racism have on you as a Native/Indigenous person growing up?

I grew up in a small town in Northern California where my mom taught us what we had to do daily. She told us we had to be at least two to three times better than others to succeed. She also used to make us do things like this (and we didn’t understand at the time, but I do now): Mom made us empty our pockets out in the car before we went into stores so nobody would ever accuse us of taking something. That was the background that we grew up with. You felt like you were always on stage, and somebody was always watching. My mother told us that you could never assume that somebody wasn’t paying attention to what you were doing at all times.

What do you believe are the causes of the deep disparities by which Native persons are involved in the justice system at much higher rates than their proportion of the population?

There are several factors, but one overlooked cause is the law itself. For example, if a Native commits a crime on an Indian Reservation, it becomes a federal offense. And the federal guidelines are much harsher than state guidelines. If a Native American and a non-Native person commit a burglary together, the non-Indian would go to state court whereas the Native/Indigenous person would be tried in federal court. And assuming they are both convicted, the federal sentencing guidelines are much harsher than the state guidelines. Well, that in and of itself can explain some of the disproportionality between the two groups in terms of statutes and how that needs to be modified. There are also concerns about the demographic composition of juries as well as cultural factors that dictate that a person must admit to wrongdoing (rather than plead not guilty and await a trial) and economic factors that limit the resources available to post bond—many homes on reservations do not have “titles” that permit a bondsman from issuing a bond in reliance on the property to guarantee appearance or even hire attorneys. Other factors include the lack of family support structures that would be easily recognizable to persons deciding upon appropriate sentencing terms, lack of cross jurisdictional agreements to monitor probation, etc.

What can policymakers and criminal justice professionals do, if anything, to mitigate these disparities?

I think there are choke points in the system where there is tremendous discretion that officials have. For example, law enforcement has the discretion to let somebody go with a warning as opposed to arresting them. Prosecutors have the discretion to charge and how high to pile the charges and then whether to plea bargain those down, for example, to a single charge or a deferred prosecution. That kind of discretion is immense, and nobody tracks that, at least that I’ve ever seen. Judges’ decisions about sentencing, even if you have strict guidelines, there’s still room to depart for certain good cause. But that good cause again is based on White middle income norms and values, so that you don’t measure the activity or the strength of the individual or extended family. As policymakers and criminal justice professionals, we need to take into consideration the nuclear family and the extended family and community with its overall strengths as vehicles for healing.

Are there innovative strategies in the tribal justice system that the U.S. justice system needs to learn from?

From my experience, and I don’t know each part of the system, I know there are successes in Native communities in different places. Nobody shares that information or that knowledge. An example is a program run by Native Americans that went from 487 kids in foster care down to single digits. This program is called “My Two Aunties,” and in tribal communities, your auntie is somebody who put their arm around you, fed you, washed your clothes, made sure you had a warm place to sleep, but also was not afraid to grab you by the ear and shake her finger in your face if that’s what you need. Somebody who’s on your side, somebody who will call you to account, but you know has your back.

If we could figure out how to do that … to treat people as if they’re our relatives and not as strangers. One of the things in the non-Native system is fairness is measured by treating everybody at arm’s length—that is, treat them all the same. Well, in tribal communities, we’re taught to treat everybody as if they are family. You’re invested in their success. You’re not just going to quote strict sentences but give them a fair chance. You’re going to do whatever you can to help them succeed. Not a free pass. But what is it going to take to help you succeed. I have a friend who runs a child welfare program for Native Americans, and she’s trained her workers to ask not “what’s wrong with you?” but “what’s strong with you?” We can build on those strengths and fill the gaps by not embracing a deficit orientation and take the strengths that Native Americans have into account.

That may be Pollyanna. But I think that has the basis of saying here’s how you succeed at a local level. We find programs, people’s stories of success, and we start to pull it out and learn from it. Discover the factors that work and then share. Most of the people who work in the system (at least in the in the child welfare system) aren’t doing it for the money, prestige, or high pay. They do it because they want to help, but we need to empower them to help and not just be another cog in a system.

What can JPRC do to move the needle in directions beneficial to Native Americans? 

JPRC is helping to move the needle by highlighting this need and engaging in its research work. I applaud your team for conducting the studies you do, and I always look forward to the results.