Law enforcement experts say the FBI, local officials and the White House need a new approach to spotting and stopping would-be attackers – and information-sharing is key

While almost all the public passion in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, has centered on guns and the proliferation of military-style assault weapons, experts and policy analysts in law enforcement have been haunted by a different but equally troubling question: why do we keep making the same mistakes?



The missed warnings were particularly egregious in the case of Nikolas Cruz, the disaffected former student who returned to Parkland’s Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school on Valentine’s Day and gunned down 17 students and teachers. The local sheriff’s office was first warned two years ago that Cruz was thinking of shooting up the school, and the FBI twice received specific warnings that it failed to follow up or pass on.

Such failures, however, are hardly unique to the Parkland case.

Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people and wounded 58 others at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June 2016, had previously been the subject of a 10-month FBI terrorism investigation.

Esteban Santiago, who killed five people and wounded eight at the Fort Lauderdale airport in January 2017, had walked into an FBI office in Alaska with a loaded handgun magazine two months earlier and reported having “terroristic thoughts”.

Devin Kelley, who killed 26 people at a church outside San Antonio, Texas, last November, had been kicked out of the air force following a conviction and prison sentence for domestic violence, but the air force forgot to notify the National Criminal Information Center so he would be prevented from buying firearms in future.

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“In almost every case, behaviors were observed and caused concern, whether in the physical world or in cyberspace through emails and social media activity, and in many cases these were reported to law enforcement,” said John Cohen, a former senior counter-terrorism coordinator with the Department of Homeland Security who now conducts training on spotting potential mass killers.

The question is: why were these mass killers not stopped?

Some of the answer has to do with straightforward blunders. But some of it is related to the culture of law enforcement, which is still grappling with the emergence of spectacular mass-casualty events, despite a crescendo of incidents since the Columbine school shootings in 1999 and a growing body of knowledge on how to prepare for and prevent them.

“If agents and officers are looking for the characteristics of a traditional terrrorist, they’re not going to find them,” Cohen said. “If they are simply looking to see if an individual has violated the law so he can be arrested, very often they will not see that and will then believe there is nothing they can do.”

What was required, Cohen said, was an entirely different approach, which involves pooling information from a variety of sources including family members, school counsellors, social workers and mental health professionals to build a behavioral risk assessment, much as the Secret Service does when sizing up threats to the president.

The single greatest issue we’ve had with our intelligence is the failure to pass on information Former sheriff Ted Sexton

At that point a number of avenues can open up: working with families or schools to address the underlying causes of an individual’s depression or mental instability; recommending in-patient or out-patient care with a mental health clinic; or going to a judge to restrict the person’s access to firearms, including ones already in the subject’s possession.

Some jurisdictions – in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the Maryland suburbs of Washington and elsewhere – are doing some or all this already. Others, though, are lagging behind. And some agencies – most notoriously the FBI – are known to be reluctant to share information at all and are prone to bureaucratic in-fighting with other agencies.

“The single greatest issue we’ve had with our intelligence is the failure to pass on information,” said Ted Sexton, a former Alabama county sheriff and former senior homeland security official. “If I have the information, I can deal with it, see if the person has a pistol permit or a history of domestic violence. If the person is a threat to himself or to others, we can deal with that through due process. Without the information, though, we can’t even do the simple things.”

What frustrates many experts in the field is that the basic knowledge is now in place. Police know to intervene right away in a so-called “active shooter” situation instead of waiting for a full Swat team to arrive. That, infamously, did not happen in Parkland even though armed deputies were on site.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A police car drives by Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, as students return to class. Photograph: Terry Renna/AP

And behavioral experts know the basic psychological profile common to almost all mass shooters of the post-Columbine type, whether they claim to be swayed by white supremacy, radical Islamism, another ideology, or no ideology at all: they tend to be loners, with perilously low self-esteem and poor or non-existent family relations, and they are looking for a way to validate themselves and take revenge on a world they blame for their troubles.

“The objective analysis of what the characteristics of mass shooters are has been done,” Cohen said. “Building a violence prevention framework has also been done. What we need to do now is work with localities so they can organize themselves, educate the public, and put together the capacity to do behavioral risk assessments. We need law enforcement, mental health and social services to be working together, and if they are not there is a high likelihood we will see more of these types of attacks, even if citizens are doing their jobs and saying something when they see something.”

Some of the obstacles to achieving this are structural. Mental health counselors, for instance, may hesitate to break doctor-patient confidentiality if there isn’t a clear threat to public safety. And the jurisprudence is less than clear on the standard of proof required to deny access to firearms, say – should it be “reasonable suspicion”, or “probable cause”, or some other standard?

“We need to decide what the appropriate balance is between individual privacy and the appropriate gathering of information to begin to mitigate these kinds of attacks,” said John Gordnier, a former top criminal prosecutor in the California attorney general’s office. “That’s a hard discussion, which requires getting away from the white noise of the broadcast media, and we are not having that discussion.”

There are also bedrock disagreements on how to classify mass shootings – as domestic terrorism, along with more overtly political and more targeted attacks, or as something separate. Such definitions have operational implications: the FBI, for example, has much greater leeway to gather intelligence on suspected terrorists than it does on other categories of suspected criminals.

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For several years, the Department of Homeland Security has been setting up information clearinghouses known as fusion centers as a place to pool and analyze information on various threats, including mass-casualty shooters. While some states have used them, and the money that comes with them, more smartly than others, many in law enforcement are now dismayed to see them de-emphasized as the Trump administration has shifted its priorities to immigration enforcement and monitoring of suspicious non-citizens.

Experts like Cohen are similarly unimpressed by Trump’s interest in paying to arm schoolteachers, and by proposed cuts to mental health provisions in the administration’s draft budget.

“It would take just a fraction of the half-billion dollars Trump has proposed to arm teachers to work with local jurisdictions and establish a threat assessment infrastructure,” Cohen said. “This is a huge issue, and we can’t address it if DHS wants to take funding away from threat management and if the administration takes away mental health funding. What they are taking away is a major part of the solution to this problem.”