Marisa Reddy Randazzo specializes in threat assessment

Social psychologist and APA member Marisa Reddy Randazzo has built a career helping the United States Secret Service (USSS), schools, colleges, businesses, law enforcement agencies and communities stop people with violent intentions from carrying them out.

Along the way, she has researched the characteristics of perpetrators of mass violence, helping to assemble a profile that is at once chilling and encouraging. She has helped establish that these people typically are not sociopaths; they are desperate. It may be possible not only to find and stop them, but also to help them.

"They're usually overwhelmed and looking to violence as a way out," says Randazzo, the founder and managing partner of SIGMA Threat Management Associates, an Alexandria, Virginia–based firm. As a graduate student at Princeton University, she was president of the student section of APA's Div. 41 (American Psychology-Law Society).

Threat assessment is an objective, fact-finding process designed to identify, assess and manage the risk of violence that a particular person poses. Randazzo's work in this area early in her career — she was chief research psychologist for the USSS's National Threat Assessment C enter in Washington, D.C. — led her to a role as co-director of the Safe School Initiative, a watershed study of school shootings conducted jointly by the Secret Service and the United States Department of Education (USDE), beginning in 1999.

Researchers have learned that two main areas of threat assessment in schools are screening for kids at risk of violence, and determining whether they are in fact on a path to violence — and, if so, how far along that path they have traveled. Randazzo quotes Jeffrey Pollard (PDF, 193KB)opens in new window, senior consulting psychologist with SIGMA: "It's not just about connecting the dots, first it's about collecting the dots."

Threat assessment in schools is typically triggered by concerning behavior — violent outbursts, artwork or homework with troubling content, a student telling friends about plans to carry out a school shooting or to bring a gun to school, or disturbing social media posts.

It's critical for school teams and even students to be alert to anything that anyone sees or hears that could lead to violence. Enlisting other students' help depends on their believing that there is at least one adult in the school setting whom they can trust, and also making students "feel empowered that they can do something to help keep their school safe," Randazzo says.

Threat assessment can make the difference between life and death. In spring of 2019, the staff of a school in Crossville, Tennessee, where SIGMA had done threat-assessment training, stopped a school shootingopens in new window planned by two sixth-graders. And researchersopens in new window at the University of Virginia have shown that, over the course of nearly two decades of interventions, well-trained teams have neutralized thousands of dangerous situations without serious harm to anyone, and in such a way that the threatening students got help and stayed in school.

After 33 people died in a shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, Virginia, in 2007, Randazzo consulted on developing a threat assessment program there, with funding from a grant from the USDE, and co-wrote a book (PDF, 1.7MB)opens in new window to share what that team learned about threat assessment in the college environment.

Randazzo spent the first decade of her professional career working for the Secret Service, translating research and the science behind it for agents and others. For the Safe School Initiative, the team interviewed 41 attackers involved in 37 incidents of targeted school violence over the course of 25 years, exploring their thinking and behavior for similarities, in hopes of learning how to prevent future attacks.

Many of the findings were surprising. Investigators found that many school attackers had acted out of "personal desperation," and years later had tremendous remorse for their crimes.

"We have come to see that many attacks were public acts of suicide, with horrific collateral damage," Randazzo says.

If not suicidal, school attackers tend to be "at the end of their rope," to the point where they don't care if they live or die, she says. "They want to end their personal pain and maybe get back at their enemies, get some fame, or maybe be killed in the process by the police. If we can help them solve those overwhelming feelings, it's possible to get them off that pathway to violence, even if they are fairly close to carrying out their plan."

Randazzo says that the Safe School Initiative, which looked at statistically rare events, used the same research design, aggregated case analysis, as the Exceptional Case Study Project (ECSP) (PDF, 1.7MB)opens in new window, which the Secret Service conducted in 1997 of people who had targeted prominent figures for violence — such as a president, another public official or a celebrity. In the ECSP, investigators interviewed 83 people who had been arrested in 76 incidents, some of which had been aborted by law enforcement, to home in on typical traits of perpetrators of targeted violence.

That study also produced some surprises. The ECSP study showed no correlation between targeted violence and mental illness. Very few perpetrators had a history of past violence. They didn't typically directly threaten their targets, either, although they often told friends or acquaintances about their plans.

"The ECSP was really groundbreaking, and it dispelled a lot of myths," Randazzo says. "It helped shed light on targeted violence as a phenomenon." While anger can certainly move a person to violence, that's not what happens in these cases. "Targeted violence is not reactive in the moment. It's calculated and predatory, and it's planned in advance."

Randazzo loved working for the Secret Service, she says, "being part of such an important mission. Everyone had the same goal: We wanted to keep people safe."

She thinks every psychologist can benefit from learning about threat assessment in today's world, incorporating its principles into clinical practice, even pursuing a career in the field. The best professional association, she says, is the multidisciplinary Association of Threat Assessment Professionalsopens in new window, based in Sacramento, California.

Randazzo says she is very proud of the fact that her firm, SIGMA, is not only "a certified woman-owned business, but also a woman-managed business. Some of the most gifted investigators I know in the field of threat assessment happen to be women."