LIVE: Secret Service Unveils Guide to Prevent Targeted Workplace Violence

Today, the Secret Service's National Threat Assessment Center is releasing its latest report, the Preventing Targeted Workplace Violence. You'll be hearing a brief overview of the report's findings, and you'll hear from Dr. Lina Alathari, A-L-A-T-H-A-R-I. She's the chief of NTAC. Also, you'll hear from Stephen Driscoll, S-T-E-V-E-N-D-R-I-S-C-O-L-L and then you'll also hear from Dr. Josh Ryan who is a supervisory research specialist J-O-S-H-R-Y-A-N so with that afterward we'll open it up to questions but I'll give it over to Dr. Alathari Good morning everyone thank you all for coming we are excited to share our latest publication with you I will be kicking it off but we will be tag-teaming it as a team. Josh was the project manager over this effort, so I do want you to hear from him. And then Stephen will talk about some of the resources that we offer for communities. But just to give you some top takeaways that we were going to be covering a little bit more in depth as we go throughout the day. So this is the first time that our agency, the Secret Service, is releasing specific guidance to help organizations prevent workplace violence based on the methodology that we use, which is essentially our behavioral threat assessment and management methodology that guides the Secret Services Protective Intelligence mission. So we are taking that guidance of the things that we do every day to keep our protectees safe and sharing that and adapting it for organizations to prevent workplace violence. How did we get here and why are we focusing today on workplace violence? What I can tell you is that many of you are familiar with a report we released a few years ago that looked at mass attacks across public spaces in the United States. And those were public spaces as well as semi-public spaces. And what we found in that report is that businesses were the most often targeted in that report. The most often targeted location were businesses. So the places where we work, the places where we shop, the places where we go to school, and so on. And so we wanted to look at this phenomenon of the targeting of businesses because we want to make sure what can we be doing as a research center but as an organization to support our partners. Secret Service is also a workplace. You all work in workplaces. And so we want to make sure that we're expanding our threat assessment model to help businesses. And we saw that from our mass attacks report. So I will cover a little bit about the subset of workplace attackers in a little bit. One of the main things that we've seen over decades of research, and including the research that is in front of you today, is that there are almost always avenues for intervention. Why? Because most of the time these attackers are exhibiting concerning behavior leading up to their attack that's observed by others around them. and those that observe include people in their personal lives, but as well as people in the workplace. And so that gives us an avenue for intervening. And what we also found is that the main motive for carrying out this attack is related to grievances. And so grievances relate to the workplace and so on. So we want to make sure that we are providing avenues for not only recognizing the warning signs, but also addressing those grievances to make sure that we're keeping communities safe. We know that prevention is possible, so this effort was initiated because of our finding that businesses are most often impacted, that workplaces are impacted, that attackers exhibit concerning behavior. So we know prevention is possible, which is why we're releasing this publication. And lastly, and I'll talk about this and so will my teammates, is that this publication is in two parts. The first part is the research on workplace attackers, but the second part is really a roadmap for organizations to follow where they can establish these behavioral threat assessment programs similar to the Secret Service methodology. And we'll talk again about our threat assessment model. This framework is scalable, so it's for organizations of any size, small, medium, or large. It really provides them a standardized framework where they can empower employees and others who are connected to the workplace to recognize the warning signs and intervene before a tragedy happens. So these are some of our takeaways. I'll tell you a little bit of our center. Most of you are familiar with this. Everything that is on this slide and all of the research for the last 25 years that NTAC has produced is on secret service.gov, our public website. But how this center started was over two decades ago, the Secret Service published groundbreaking research looking at assassination in the United States. And that research study looked at a 50-year period of those who assassinated or approached to assassinate a public official or a public figure in the United States. That study coined the term target of violence and really provided the Secret Service with a model for how we can prevent, identify and prevent violence and identify individuals who might have a concerning or threatening interest. Over the decades since that research study was published, NTAC has produced guidance supporting school safety, workplaces, colleges and universities and so on. So the center was established in 2000 through a congressional authorization of the Presidential Threat Protection Act to conduct research, to continue researching targeted violence, provide training to our public safety partners and communities across the nation, and also to consult on building these programs, and this is why we publish these types of guidance. So for today's publication, it's divided into two parts. So part one is looking at the research of specifically a subset of the 173 mass attacks that we published on a few years ago. We looked specifically at a subset workplace attackers, and that is about 50 incidents. So those 50 incidents were perpetrated at a variety of businesses, and we'll talk about these locations, but it occurred across industries as well. So health care was impacted, retail, manufacturing, and so on. So the first part is looking at the research. Why are we looking at the research? Because to understand how to prevent it, we need to look at the thinking, behavior, and circumstances of attackers and see what led them up to carrying out such an act of violence. And then part two is the guidance that we're providing. It's the framework that I talked about. How can organizations prevent them? And what we used to inform this publication, you'll see on the right side, first of all, decades of Secret Service operations and behavioral threat assessment through our protective intelligence investigations, decades of NTAC research on attackers, targeted violence attackers, including mass attackers that we published. We also reviewed literature on workplace violence, as well as literature on best practices in behavioral threat assessment. And as I said, part one examined specifically the background of those that targeted workplaces so we can understand the prevention. And what's really most unique about this research study and publication is that the guidance was informed directly by practitioners in the field. We went out and did informational interviews with those that have roles in various workplaces. So we're talking human resources, executives, security, cybersecurity, insider threat, mental health, and law enforcement. So anyone that has a role in a workplace setting, we interviewed because we wanted to make sure that we were looking at the best practices that organizations are already doing and also what are the challenges, what are the barriers to establishing prevention programs. You'll see in the publication that Secret Service is releasing today that we have sections in there called Voices from the Field. Those are direct information from those practitioners that we interviewed sharing with us why it's so important that they establish these violence prevention programs and what's working. And so let's look at some of the data. I'll just do a brief overview. There's a lot more detail in the publication. but these are the most frequently targeted workplaces out of these 50 subset of workplace attackers so you're looking at retail and services so that would include you know stores as well as places where you will receive services nail salons banks as well as restaurants and bars manufacturing distribution centers open spaces health care residential communities so these are all the type of workplaces that were impacted. And I'm just going to use one of the case examples just to highlight how devastating these tragedies are. This is a case in which the attack occurred in February 2020 at the Molson Coors Brewing Company. This was carried out by an employee who was an active employee at the time that he carried out his attack. When he showed up at the worksite. He started his shift about 7 a.m. What went throughout his day at lunchtime, he made some kind of comments about a co-worker that he had voiced grievances about in the past. And then around two o'clock, he was overheard calling his daughter's school to arrange for someone else to pick her up from school, which was highly unusual because he used to pick up his daughter every day. And then shortly after that is when he started his attack. The first person he shot is the person that he had voiced a grievance against in the past. That was in the control room. And then he unfortunately went and shot four more individuals. This individual had a history of basically significant stressors in the workplace and outside the workplace. This attack happened in 2020. Around 2015, he tore a rotator cuff. He did not do the surgery because he didn't want to miss time from work. He was having financial issues, so he wanted to make sure he was still getting paid, still coming to work. A few years later, about 2017, he tore his rotator cuff again. This time, he was out of work for three months. He applied for workman's compensation, which the company refuted. So over that time period, between 2017 and to 2020, these financial stressors were compounded by the fact that he was having deteriorating mental health issues. He was becoming more paranoid. He thought that his co-workers were spying on him, trying to prove that he wasn't really injured. He started setting up surveillance cameras in his home, in his basement, in his kitchen. He would accuse coworkers of breaking into his locker because his tablet's battery was running low. So you can see that the paranoia and agitation was increasing over a few years prior to him carrying out his attack. So this was a current active employee at the site. Now, all but one of the 50 incidents were perpetrated by a single attacker. And most often, as you can see from the affiliation to the site, most often these attackers were known or knowable to the organization. And what do I mean by that? Known meaning that their identity, their behaviors are immediately recognized and known by the organization or could reasonably be recognized. So you had current or former employees were the biggest category, followed by customers, clients, patients, and visitors. And these are not just any visitor to a work site. they're knowable, meaning their behavior had brought attention. They were either regular clients or substantive clients or patients. Maybe they had, you know, been making grievances to work the workplace because of some issues they were having. And so known or knowable clients, patients and visitors. Patients are significant. We know we've seen a rise in sort of health care, violence impacting health care settings. And then the last category is romantic partners or relatives of those connected to the worksite. and so an estranged spouse, maybe targeting his wife's workplace or targeting, we have cases where they would target those associated with the spouse, maybe the divorce attorney. And typically those were related to custody issues or divorces and things like that. We have consistently found that there is no single demographic profile of a workplace attacker. In fact, a mass attacker. But they do have common behaviors in their backgrounds and circumstances that give us tremendous avenues for intervening and preventing them. So grievances were the number one motive. We see that across all our research. Their grievances are often related, and you see in this report for the workplace attackers, most often related to personal issues such as being denied services or expelled. One attacker was expelled from a treatment center or denied service at a mental health treatment center because he had a history of violence. And then he showed up with a bladed weapon and carried out an attack. Workplace issues, so facing disciplinary actions, being passed over for promotions, conflicts with co-workers, being perceived or real bullying or harassment in the workplace, as well as domestic issues, as I mentioned, related to custody issues. What you'll notice is that the majority were related to grievances and very few others were related to other motives. So this is why it's so important as part of our guidance is recognizing when there are issues in the workplace and addressing grievances before they escalate to the point where someone takes action. As I said before, we know that our model works. We know the Secret Service Threat Assessment model that's adapted to workplaces, behavioral threat assessment and management works because they do show behaviors leading up to their attacks that are observed by those around them. And that would include personal lives, so family members, friends, as well as those in the workplace, co-workers, supervisors, and others in the workplace. So most of them engage in this concerning behaviors. And what's most significantly is that those that observe the behavior in over half the cases fear for the safety of themselves the safety for the attacker and the safety of those around them so these are some legitimate concerns that are recognizable and are being seen and one of the main findings that we saw in our original mass attack study was that over 40 percent of all mass attackers had a history of domestic violence and that's even more significant in this subset of 50 workplace attackers, that number jumps up to 53%. So 53% had a history of domestic violence. You won't always find that in the records because they weren't always charged for these criminal acts. So in fact, in a third of cases, there were no charges. These are just some of the examples of the objectively concerning behaviors that these attackers were exhibiting, sometimes in the months or years leading up to their attacks. disturbing or threatening statements, making idiosyncratic or erratic statements, unusual behaviors, stalking or harassing, whether it's co-workers or someone at the site, as well as we talked about a significant presence of domestic violence. Domestic violence wasn't always the motive for the attack, but we do see it in histories of someone who may have targeted related to a grievance with co-workers, but also had a history of domestic violence. So we see this criminal history in their backgrounds. Now what we found in the analysis is that over 50% had a history of mental health issues and as you can see the breakdown that involved psychotic symptoms, depression, and suicidality. The most common psychotic symptoms included delusions, so that's a fixed or idiosyncratic false belief despite any evidence to the contrary that they had. Most common type of delusion was paranoid delusion, feeling that people are out to get you, being afraid someone is intending to do you harm, as well as hallucinations. And most often, those that experienced hallucinations were auditory. They were hearing voices or commands to do something. But we also saw a history of depression and suicidality. And as you can see, the blue represents the current or former employee attackers. They had significantly across the range higher rates of mental health issues than other types of attackers. So what weapons and tactics were used and how did these attacks end? Firearms were the most frequent weapon used. So you can see in 43 of the 50 cases there were firearms. That involved 33 handguns and 10 long guns. But you also see bladed weapons were used as well as a couple of other incidents in which a vehicle was used as well as explosives. And how did these attacks end? Most often, the attackers ended their attack on their own, and they were either arrested at the site or left and then were arrested. But in at least 23 of those cases, the attacker died by suicide at the scene. And so most often, they end the attack on their own, but many of those die at the scene by suicide. Law enforcement intervention ended several of the attacks, and in about nine, I believe, and in seven of those, law enforcement actually fatally shot the attacker. And then you had a case in which, a case or two in which a bystander intervened or the attacker ran out of ammunition. And tragically, there were 247 harmed, as you can see across these 50 cases, that involved 119 killed. This is one of the cases that we have in the report. I wanted to highlight cases that shows kind of the range of these types of attackers. So the other case I talked about was a current active employee. This is a case in which an external person targeted, but a knowable person. So when we talked about knowable, this individual showed up at the Capitol Gazette with weapons and he attacked the staff and he killed, unfortunately, five staffers. then he hid under the desk and waited for law enforcement to respond. What led us here? A few years prior to the attack, around 2010, I believe, he messaged a woman that he had gone to high school with. He sent her a Facebook request and sent her a message and said, I remember you. You were always nice to me. She didn't really remember him, but through emails, he told her that he was having problems in his life and that he needed help. and she was just trying to be nice through these messages and would say, maybe you should go see a counselor. She didn't really remember him at all. Well, that started a year of stalking and harassing that she suffered. He would send her messages that alternated between being nice, saying, you know, you were always nice, to telling her to go kill herself and vulgar and calling her vulgar names. It culminated, this lasted for a year, and it culminated in him calling the bank where she worked and telling her manager that she was bipolar and a drunkard. That led her to finally filing a police report. So she'd experienced a year of this harassment. She filed a police report. He was charged with electronic harassment, and then he pled guilty, but he was given a 90-day suspended sentence and probation. Well, a newspaper reporter for the Gazette wrote an article, and she said, that said for one woman that experience turned into a year-long nightmare about he started out with when you get a friend request and he talked about this case and so this attacker was so incensed by this that he started targeting the reporter and he filed defamation suits and he would post them online and so he created a twitter page that was his own defending himself but he had the picture of the reporter. And on that reporter's face was this mark. It was called the brand of sacrifice from some dark comic medieval series where it talks about that person dying a violent death. And he, between 2011 and 2016, tweeted about the Capital Gazette 149 times and the reporter specifically 101 times. And he would tweet, tag them. He would also post all of his court records. He was very erratic in the courtroom. This caused such significant concern that the newspaper editor passed his picture that this person's picture around to the workplace in case he showed up. He gave that picture to his own wife at home because he would actually mention the staffers of the newspaper including the editor in his tweets and they were so concerned that they went to the local police department to file to ask for help filing this restraining order or doing something? Can he be charged? And the police department looked at his Twitter account and said, well, he never made a direct threat and he hasn't shown up to the site to try to get in. There's nothing we can do about it. He hasn't done anything criminal. But if you look at his tweets, and this is why our center, the National Threat Assessment Center, when we say there's no profile, but there's also, you can't just focus on threats and objective concerning behaviors or a direct threat to institute intervention because he would mention the Charles Hebdo Paris attack in which 12 staffers were killed. He would use words like, I'm going to murder their career. He would say open season. So he was using language that when you look at the context of what was happening is truly concerning, but he never made a direct threat and he never showed up to the site prior to his attack. He got to the point, his case was dismissed by the judge. Even the judge said that he, after the attack, said he had used to fear for his own safety and he would look out the window before he went to work. This was years of objectively concerning behavior from a known or knowable person to the workplace. So this is why we share this information to show that this attack can come from anywhere, but there are avenues for intervention, whether it's leveraging the legal system or some other means, which we'll talk about in a little bit. So everything that we do, all the research that we do feeds the secret service model. How do we identify individuals who might be exhibiting concerning or threatening behavior, gathering information to assess, does this person pose a risk of harm? And if the answer is yes, and what type of risk, putting together the intervention strategies to mitigate a violent outcome. So I'm going to turn it over to Josh, Dr. Ryan, who was the project manager for this awesome initiative and he will talk you a little bit through the framework good morning uh so i'm dr josh ryan i'm the project manager for the publication i'm just going to talk to you a little bit about briefly because i know you guys probably have burning questions going to get to that in just a few moments i'm just going to talk briefly about the framework that we're presenting to the organization so they can take action and prevent these acts of violence so as lena just discussed part one is really about summarizing the research and the findings that we have across these attackers and really finding those common patterns of behavior, right? And as Lena mentioned, a lot of these individuals engage in these concerning behaviors at their places of employment or at the targeted site and those concerning behaviors really represent opportunities for intervention. So part two of the publication that we released today really focuses on basically arming organizations so they can capitalize and use those opportunities for intervention and take appropriate action. So the publication here offers an eight-step scalable framework that could be used by organizations to implement this model that Lena just discussed, the identify, assess, and manage that the Secret Service utilizes every day. So the eight steps that you see here, they are based upon the work that the Secret Service does every day to protect our nation. It is also based on the research that Lena just described. Also based on, as Lena mentioned, we did a series of informational interviews with businesses. So we talked to folks from human resources, security, cybersecurity, insider threat, employee assistance programs, right? And they came from global corporations. They also came from modestly sized businesses. And we talked to them about basically what they do, what challenges they were facing, what seems to be working well, and what lessons they learned in their careers. And then we leveraged all of that in our guidance. so that other organizations can benefit from that wisdom and put that into action to save lives. So I'm not going to go through these eight steps in great detail, but I will share a little bit of information about what you might find in each of these. So the first two steps really give a framework or a foundation that the other steps will build upon. So step one is about basically committing and investing in employee safety and support. So things that we talk about in that chapter include securing buy-in from organizational leaders, right? So ensuring that they're allocating the appropriate staffing, the resources, making sure that they're basically taking this seriously. We also talk about the importance of organizations establishing partnerships with community members. So, for instance, state and local law enforcement or mental health professionals being partners in this initiative, this process. And to give you an example, in the pages of our publication in Step 1, we have a cross-example of two different organizations, each who have very different outcomes. So one of the organizations was able to secure leadership buy-in. They were able to get the resources that they needed, and they saw really great outcomes in sort of building out this program and leveraging and doing all these things that we say are best practices. And then right next to that, you see an organization that had very different outcomes, where they narrowly avoided a violent incident where an employee who was terminated basically threatened the employees, said he was going to come back to the workplace with a gun. And that information wasn't communicated, right? So it wasn't communicated appropriately, so no action could be taken. And so they only narrowly avoided a violent incident there. And that's largely because the organization has been refusing essentially to take this issue seriously and allocate the appropriate resources, right? So just to sort of highlight that importance of that commitment to employee safety. Step two just essentially puts pen to paper, identifies the standards, the expectations in policy and procedures that the organization should use to build out this program. Step three really covers the fact that this process is not done by a single individual alone, right? So it really is a team effort. So best practice would be to utilize a multidisciplinary team. So just as the Secret Service, right, there's not one individual typically who's identifying assessing and managing an individual concern there's a whole network we have different divisions and all sorts of individuals you know outside the limelight who are doing a lot of this work so likewise in an organization right really requires that multidisciplinary team different individuals for instance human resources security a manager or supervisor all coming to the table to sort of do that important work of identifying assessing and managing concerns and one important thing to note here and we talked about it in step three right so naturally some of your your readers your viewers your listeners might have the question of alright well the Secret Service is recommending this new program right for violence prevention how much is gonna cost me right and one of the great benefits of this model is that it's often utilizing some of the resources that organizations already have within their own walls right so organizations often already have talented personnel people and human resources or skilled managers who could deal with conflict and those individuals with their skill sets can be put to bear in this process. Step four through six really talks organizations through that process of identifying a concern. So step four is all about identifying individuals who are displaying those concerning behaviors and then how to sort of handle that information, how to process those reports. Step five really talks about how organizations are going to assess the risk posed by an individual or situation. Now one thing I want to mention for step five um i've seen certainly some media reports and maybe some of you have even reported on this in the past but sometimes a violent incident will occur and you'll get stories of friends and neighbors and supervisors and bosses and others who come you know forward afterwards after a violent incident has happened and they'll share this information about concerns they had about the perpetrator right uh they'll share you know different details and you hear these different stories and then naturally your readers or listeners uh might ask the question well why was nothing done right so perfectly natural question to ask and typically what we find is that the answer to that question is the information is siloed right so different people have different pieces of information but there's no one person putting it all together right so just as if I gave everyone in this room a piece of a puzzle right but didn't let you communicate with each other you'd have a very difficult time putting that full puzzle together and seeing the whole picture right so really what we use in the Secret Service is we use what we call the systems approach to help navigate the coordination of different entities to bring that information together so you can see that whole picture, right? So we identify where information might come from. Also, as Lisa and Lena described, we have common patterns of behavior, right, based on our research. So what we've done is we've collected that information and packaged it in these 20 assessment themes. So what these assessment themes do is it communicates those common circumstances, those common behaviors that we see across attackers, so that organizations can leverage this information when trying to make a determination. Ultimately, step five is all about equipping organizations with the knowledge of where to go for information and how to look at information to make that determination of risk, right? So it's all about arming them with the knowledge needed to assess risk. And of course, if there is a risk that's assessed, if they believe that there is a risk of harm to maybe that individual or someone else, then of course we want to take that seriously and take action. So that's what step six is about. So, for instance, if you consider concerns that arise from employees versus non-employees, like a patient or a visitor, that's going to require a very different process. And so in step six, we sort of walk through how that process might be different, right? So some of the businesses that we talk to in these informational interviews largely are concerned about threatening or concerning behaviors arising from patients or visitors or clients, right, versus others that are more concerned about employees, right? So naturally, these are going to have very different processes. The whole identify and assess, manage model works either way. It works for both of those populations. But the actual strategies utilized is going to look a little bit different. And that's what we break down in step six. And then finally, step seven and eight really just talk about how organizations are going to implement an effective climate to enhance reporting and address some of the grievances that might otherwise fuel the propensity for violence across individuals. And then also, of course, the need for training, right? So all individuals in the organization must be trained to recognize and report these concerning behaviors, as Lena mentioned. And just a quick example, right, of some of the information in the guidance portion of our publication. We mentioned this a few times, but essentially behaviors occur along a continuum, right? So, for example, here we have a list of potentially concerning behaviors, including individuals bullying or harassing others in the workplace, even brandishing a weapon in the workplace and now if we look at these behaviors right each of them might be concerning but we have different levels of concern so some of these things are going to be objectively concerning so an individual bullying and harassing other people or even bringing or brandishing a weapon in the workplace those are likely going to violate violate company policy they might even violate laws right so those of course should be taken very seriously and handled by the organization versus some of these other things like like decreased productivity, increased absenteeism from an employee, or challenges with mental health, right? These might not necessarily warrant immediate safety concerns from any individuals around them who see it, but nonetheless are concerning, right? And so really this model is not punitive in nature. It does not have to be about punishing employees who are having a demonstrated immediate risk of violence. Really we use a low threshold of concern and have this proactive approach because in many cases, particularly the ones on the left here, if you have an employee demonstrating some of these behaviors, that might be an individual that needs help and needs support, right? So things like employee assistance programs and de-escalation techniques and conflict mediation, those are going to be brought to bear in this process as well, right? So it's not strictly about punishment. And ultimately, all employees must be trained to recognize and report these concerning behaviors, again, including both conductually concerning and objectively concerning behaviors so that action can be taken. All right, so now I'm going to turn it over to Stephen, Assistant Chief Stephen Driscoll. He's going to talk a little bit about our outreach efforts. Good morning, everyone. So as a real quick recap, from our chief, Dr. Alathari, you heard a quick overview of some of the research findings, what we know, what we know about attackers and instances of mass violence in workplaces. And then Dr. Ryan provided an overview of what the guidance tells us. That's the second part of today's publication. I'm going to talk a little bit briefly here about how we ensure that the information and the guidance that we have and the operational expertise of the Secret Service is reaching the communities that need it, in this case the workplaces across our country. So I'm Stephen Driscoll. I'm the Assistant Chief for Outreach for the National Threat Assessment Center, which means it's my responsibility to ensure that our knowledge, our expertise, and our resources are reaching workplaces and other public safety professionals across the country. We know that prevention is possible if communities are equipped with the right guidance, the right education, and the right training in this space. And we know that the need exists. When you look at, for example, hospitals and healthcare settings, we see threats and acts of violence directed against healthcare professionals at an all-time high. And so that's just one example where we see the need for this type of training and resources across our country. And this publication marks the first time that we've provided this guidance specifically on how to prevent workplace violence. Every sector will be safer with this type of information and these types of programs, and that includes businesses, manufacturing, healthcare, education, and government. As Dr. Al-Thawri mentioned, we have a mandated mission at the National Threat Assessment Center to produce research and guidance and also deliver training and consultation to public safety professionals across the country. So the primary avenue we utilize to make sure that this education is reaching these public safety professionals is through our training mission. Our training, like this guidance, provides a roadmap for how to not only understand what the problem is, but to develop and implement programs based on Secret Service research and methodology. Just last year, we delivered 437 training events across the country to over 50,000 participants. That number of training events was the all-time high in our 30-year history and exceeded our previous year's all-time high in 2025. Over the last five years, we've trained a quarter million public safety professionals in the research findings of the National Threat Assessment Center and how to implement the Secret Services Behavioral Threat Assessment Model, whether that's a workplace, a state or local police department, a school, a university, a house of worship, or a government agency. We also maintain the NTAC portion of the Secret Services public website at secretservice.gov slash NTAC. There you can not only download any of our research and guidance publications, you can also sign up for virtual training events, including the special rollout event that's happening today for our workplace violence publication. That will air at noon today and has 12,000 public safety professionals from across the country registered to learn the latest research and guidance on workplace violence prevention. I also want to highlight our consultation mission. This is another mandated mission space for us under the Presidential Threat Protection Act of 2000. We are authorized to consult both on the development of behavioral threat assessment programs and policies, which means we can work directly, in this case, with a workplace or an organization to develop the violence prevention portion of their workplace violence prevention plan. We also have an authority to consult on complex threat cases, which means if a workplace or a local police department or a school or a university had a threat case that they were looking for consultative guidance on how to assess and further manage, we could convene our team at the National Threat Assessment Center to work directly with them at their request and at no cost. Many of these resources, both in training and consultation, are facilitated by our team of program managers that are embedded in Secret Service field offices across the country. So separate from our D.C.-based research team, these program managers in our field offices are really the front-line points of contact for our state and local partners and community members to reach the National Threat Assessment Center directly. And so again, we're reaching record highs in our training and our consultation missions because our communities have direct access to the National Threat Assessment Center. That means a workplace in a state anywhere across the country can contact their local domestic security strategist and have a direct line of communication to the National Threat Assessment Center. And so in closing, we know that there are success stories of tragedies prevented every day. Every day across our country, organizations are utilizing the Secret Service methodology to prevent mass violence, and the National Threat Assessment Center will continue to amplify this message that violence is preventable. Okay, so with that, we can open up to questions about the report. That's why we released this guidance. We want to make sure we're empowering employees to come forward with information. I would say the first line is speak to your manager. And then find out if there's a person in your organization, whether it's employee relations or security, that you can turn to for support. And never back away from asking or telling someone that you're concerned, because at the very least, your concerns will be addressed and more significantly, you could be preventing something harmful from happening. We know we can prevent attacks because we've seen it. In fact, even the cases that Stephen talked about where we consult those are some really serious cases that people are reaching out to us about and just by virtue of us having that assembled team that's on the call let's say if it's a workplace they'll have security they'll have legal they'll have the mental health just by all of us talking and strategizing intervention strategies we have prevented unwanted outcomes and we know that because they reach back out to us whether it's a school or workplace and say thank you so much for your help. We truly believe we just prevented something bad from happening. Are we going to prevent everything? No. But this is the best practice that will give us the most opportunities to intervene early before they even escalate to the objectively concerning behaviors that you're seeing. Right. No, that's a very good question, Holmes. So what we have seen, and I can tell you is that for the Capital Gazette, yes, physical security is important, obviously, in any organization, and you see when you come in here. But for us as an agency, just as important as the physical security measures we employ are our threat assessments to identify, assess, and intervene. With that individual, hindsight, obviously, but he really did exhibit a lot of concerning behavior. And I think law enforcement could have been a partner in that. Maybe if he had charged, maybe if he had a restraining order, maybe that would have prevented him access from buying a firearm. So a lot of the interventions can't just be by the organization, which is why a big section of that guidance is you have the team members within the organization, but you also have to rely on community partners. And that includes mental health, includes law enforcement. For us as an agency, one of the biggest systems we deal with is mental health to help us intervene. So that's kind of one part. It's not just about the physical security and resources. It's also who can you rely on to help create a situation that's less prone to violence. Nicole? No, absolutely. And so this today is about releasing guidance for workplaces. There's a report sitting right there, Stephen, if you want to hold it up, is a guide for law enforcement. And why did we release a guide specifically for law enforcement to establish threat assessment units? Because typically law enforcement, fair, that's how they're trained is looking for crime they're trying to process you know arrest someone who committed a crime you know prevent a crime and so on they're not usually traditionally thinking of i can if a family member reaches out to me and they're concerned about their son because he's posting online well if he hasn't done anything what do i do so now we are taking the secret service model and we have adapted it for state and local law enforcement so that they can use that same approach thinking beyond a crime and what we've seen that it's some police departments are really doing a fantastic job of that you had one of the sheriff's that I worked with because he was the chair of the Marjorie Stoneman Public Safety Commission sheriff Galtieri believed in threat assessment so much after we testified testified in the Florida Commission he set up a 70 unit threat assessment unit within the Pinellas County Sheriff's Department that includes mental health professionals as well as law enforcement enforcement working together for precisely those kind of cases where there's no crime but what can we do to keep this community safe? No I understand what you're saying and we hear this a lot sometimes in our consults well if I file a restraining order is that going to make them worse or and we see that in some of the stalking harassing cases as well that we've consulted on what I can tell you intervention usually works but it has to be intervention appropriate to what the situation so each case is unique so it's how you approach that individual with the interventions is it mental health it is so on and even when you have you even when you have to take disciplinary action even when you have to do sort of consequences for a behavior what I like to say is do consequences with care. Make it about the behavior, not the person, and it's how you approach them. So building these relationships in the workplace ahead of time, building rapport, empowering important employees, training employees, I think all works towards helping de-escalate these types of situations. Derek? So it's funny you ask because a few years ago we met with, I want to say it was the senate or the house sergeant of arms and we talked about our models and these behaviors and the threats that they could be getting and one of the things that we saw in some of our research in fact a few years ago we released a case study on the congressional baseball practice shooter looking at you know years of anger and grievances that he had one of the things that we found is that the district level staff often like they'll report threats but they don't always report the concerning behavior someone who's constantly calling harassing but not actually making a direct threat so what we did is we did training for all the district staff to kind of recognize the concerns and report them so that it can be acted on because just because someone's here doesn't mean that in the community that's not going to be an issue so yes this is for all workplaces to establish these programs. Capitol Police actually has a big threat management unit. They've had it for years. So they're already sort of ahead of the game on kind of this behavioral threat assessment. They adapted that from the Secret Service work decades ago, and we've done a lot of training for Capitol Police as well. Thank you all.