Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management Institute
The Science and Art of Threat Assessment
Threat assessment is a skill set that blends art and science. Interviewers must keep a flexible stance that fits the person in front of them, not just the script they brought. That flexibility allows them to build rapport, ask hard questions without escalating tension, and accurately capture both risk and protective factors. The interview leads to an assessment of the threat and, in turn, to the development of a risk mitigation plan.
We’ve taught threat assessment principles for over twenty years. The progression from theory and lectures to practical case examples to interactive tabletops has improved the skills of counselors, law enforcement officers, conduct officers, human resource professionals, and emergency preparedness personnel in assessing and managing threats. Yet there is no substitute for experience, and working a case with a team, from the initial incident report to the risk and mitigation write-up.
The BTAM Institute is built for doers. Instead of talking about interviews, we put you in one. It's live, messy, and true to how threats unfold. Research is clear that multidisciplinary, collaborative teams are most effective at preventing targeted violence. But to make that teamwork count, you need sharp interviewing chops and the ability to synthesize third-party reports, social media signals, and witness statements into a coherent picture. We fuse evidence-based methods with immersive practice so your team can move from “we think” to “we know, and here’s why.”
You’ll triage a threat from the ground up. For each case, you will spot contextual clues, map risk and protective factors, select the appropriate interviewer(s), and run the conversation in real time. New and seasoned professionals work side-by-side using our triage and violence risk assessment expert systems, then receive precise feedback on questioning, pacing, and pivoting when defensiveness arises. You’ll finish by co-authoring a defensible risk report and a practical mitigation plan, tools you can lift and use the moment you’re back on campus or at work.
On day one, we drop you into a realistic case. You’ll comb through the incident report, map what context you still need, and plan your outreach strategy. You’ll make live calls and send messages to our team of trained actors posing as collateral sources, then sit down for a full interview with the subject. We record and transcribe your interview so feedback is concrete and specific.
Day two shifts from collection to judgment. As a group, you’ll stitch together what everyone found, close the gaps, and use a clear framework to set a defensible risk level. You’ll draft a written threat report with prioritized action items, and you’ll receive direct notes from both the actor and our faculty on your interview approach. To round it out, we provide a video of our team interviewing the same subject for side-by-side comparison, your annotated recording and transcript, and a model recommendations package you can bring back to your institution.
Well, we literally wrote the book(s) on interviewing and threat assessment in schools, colleges, universities, and workplaces. Dr. Van Brunt and his team have developed ten unique threat assessment systems, written over two dozen books, and published supplemental articles and peer-reviewed research on the topic. By focusing on an intersectional approach to assessment, interviewing, and risk mitigation across the fields of criminology, student discipline and conduct, human resources, counseling, psychology, legal studies, and emergency preparedness, this course is the best way to take your skills from the classroom into the field.
We also provide a smaller teaching and learning environment that moves beyond the crowded 150-seat rooms at a busy conference venue, with $30 boxed lunches and shiny name tags. We offer our classes in New Orleans at small locations that allow groups to engage in direct conversations with other participants and the instructors. We want you to learn these skills so you can apply them when you return to work.
While the course is built on the idea of in-person training, we recognize the need for online opportunities as well. Choose the format that fits your team.
In Person
$969
per person
Virtual
$799
per person
Virtual Team
$2499
up to 10 team members
We provide dinner on the first night for in-person attendees based on local New Orleans restaurants and cuisine. For example, one of our local instructors cooked a crab and shrimp boil for participants during our first session, and coffee and beignets were plentiful.
We believe in this training approach, even though it is a bit more costly than a simple tabletop exercise or walking people through a case study. The individual interview experiences, feedback on your written report and mitigation plans, and opportunities to watch others approach their interviews in various ways offer a level of feedback you just don’t get from other conferences and trainings.
Ah, the City of New Orleans. Dr. Van Brunt fell in love during his first visit for a counseling conference several decades ago. There is something about the city and its history of darkness and light. It has an energy made up of grit, music, and straight talk; this is why we chose this location for the event. Come walk it with us.
You walk down an uneven sidewalk on St. Peter between Royal and Bourbon is pure, no-chaser New Orleans. A voodoo shop and a couple of bars glow to your left, Pat O’Brien’s hums to your right. At the end of St. Peter, Preservation Hall squeezes out hot jazz to a packed wooden room with no A/C, just history and breath and brass. You turn the corner and Bourbon awaits. At dawn, the street is hosed clean, with beads, secrets, and last night’s excess rinsed away in kind of a baptism, only to crawl back after sunset, clothed in neon and noise. A stocky hustler angles toward you, “Betcha I can tell ya where ya got dem shoes!” You don’t break stride, “On my feet, my brother, right here in New Orleans.”