James S. Cawood, PhD, CPP, CTM

Cawood is a practicing threat assessment and management professional who began his career in law enforcement and moved into private-sector investigative and security work; he is one of the earliest private-sector practitioners working to prevent violence in organizational settings.

Tell us a bit about your background. What is your area of research? What is your most recent journal editing experience?

My areas of research involve creating, testing, and improving structured professional judgment tools that aid in the assessment of violence risk for different populations of individuals that interact with organizations (e.g., schools, post-secondary institutions, private and public businesses, and public and government agencies), as well as developing policies, procedures, and practices to aid in preventing violence. My editorial experience began at the inception of the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management (JTAM) as an editorial board member, then becoming an associate editor before becoming editor. I am passionate about all aspects of this field and enjoy teaching, mentoring, conducting research, and providing consulting and training services to organizations globally.

What are your main priorities? For example, how will you grow readership, what type of scholarship would you like to see in the journal, and what kind of content are you hoping to attract? 

My main priority is to continue to build on the impressive legacies of the previous editors—Stephen Hart, PhD, and Tyson Bailey, PsyD, ABPP—and continue to expand the types of published articles and insights that offer a more diverse, worldwide view related to threat assessment and management practices. In addition, the journal’s content must be provided by a wide range of individuals from different professional backgrounds and perspectives, all of whom can provide knowledge and insights from their far-ranging research and experience. I am also interested in encouraging more voices and opinions using commentaries, brief reports, and perspective articles, in addition to all forms of research (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods) and case studies. Commentaries are focused on current processes and emerging trends, such as the use of artificial intelligence, while perspective articles focus on forthcoming issues that require some consideration about how to prepare the field for the future.

Why is this journal important for the field? What is its relevance to society/public health?

JTAM is a truly multidisciplinary journal that focuses on the application of knowledge related to violence prevention, assessment, response, and intervention. Although many journals have wide-ranging readerships, the field of threat assessment and management has practitioners coming from the core competencies of law enforcement, security, intelligence and protective intelligence, human resources, psychology, psychiatry, social work, and lawyers involved in both civil and criminal law, as well as school administrators, social workers, and victims’ advocates. In JTAM , we all come together to share our knowledge related to effective strategies to aid violence prevention.

What challenges, if any, lie ahead for the field and the journal? What issues do you see as important for the field to address more broadly?

Currently, the largest challenge for JTAM is encouraging and supporting new authors who want to contribute but who may not have come from an academic background where they learned to present their ideas in a scholarly style. It is not enough to send those authors to a website or video about how to write for a peer-reviewed journal; they need encouragement and insights into how to shape their thoughts and experiences and then how to practically translate them into an article that provides significant and useful information to their peers.

For the field, the greatest challenge is how to more effectively encourage, and possibly enforce, organizations of all types to adopt, implement, and rigorously apply empirically tested and evidence-based threat assessment and management practices. Like many professional areas, the field has known for more than 30 years a range of proven practices to implement and apply to help prevent violence, and yet the adoption rate is still too low across the globe, especially in countries without effective systems to hold private and public institutions accountable for helping protect people from violence.