We have all heard the term “threat assessment” some point in our lives, however, few of us ever took it seriously like we should. Afterall, we all needed to threat assess one way or the other day in and day out. By definition, threat assessment is to identify the behaviors of a certain target and to determine the likelihood of him/her conduct certain act so we can prevent him/her from ever doing it beforehand.
As a polygraph examiner myself, background investigations and pre/post-test interviews are essential. When necessary, families and friends of the assessed target may also be a good source of information.
On the other hand, for assessment professionals, they will focus on a wide variety of standard practices, such as critical infrastructure and key inventory, criticality assessment, threat assessment, vulnerability assessment, risk calculation, and countermeasure identification.
For certain consultation companies who perform the actual assessment, they will be working closely with law enforcement databases and various affiliated local businesses along with hospitals, schools, and NGOs to maximize their periphery of vulnerability coverage.
A threat management plan will be synthesized based on the assessment target or targeted population group. For example, if a sex shop owner determines one of his individual employee work in the front counter poses certain personality trait that might put his business, his walk-in clients or himself to harm, he will need a specific assessment/management plan to keep that specific employee in check.
For example, the owner might need to request a surveillance package, he might need to keep all the penis pump straps out of the reach of that specific front-counter employee to prevent her from strangling any male walk-in client with the penis pump strap when her emotion gets out of hand, he might need to have her attend a paid mental health session with another female psychiatrist to talk to her.
After all, the variety of measures used during threat management serves the one and only purpose, ensure the individual target or targeted population group is under control.
In formal terms, to keep the individual target or targeted population under control, different method of threat monitoring can be done. It is usually “three way or the freeway”. The first method is the traditional law enforcement styled social media, communication, and physical surveillance.
It has proven to be the most effective control measure. The second method is to overtly monitor the target’s family, associates, and distant contacts by having an undercover investigator acting as an agent.
This is more costly, however, a more artistic way to conduct “monitoring”. The third method, however, sounds strange to many. It involves using a laser item on a target so the target is exposed at all times.
This is a newly developed method of threat control, differs from the sex offender tracker used by law enforcements. Either way, the target/population group has to be controlled or they will be on the “freeway” dealing a hefty amount of damage to their host organizations.
An optimization method can be performed on the target’s surroundings so the target wouldn’t have to be forced into “flight-or-flight” mode after he/she discovered he/she is being monitored.
However, this method is more difficult because it requires the management provider devote more resources into persuade all of the target’s family member or coworker to work together on the target.
Such capacity can only be achieved through law enforcement bodies and not by private organizations. Therefore, traditional forms of assessment and monitoring other than the optimization method tend to come hand in hand with private companies