Understanding the Potential for Multidisciplinary Threat Assessment and Management Teams to Prevent Terrorism: Conducting a Formative Evaluation of the MassBay Threat Assessment Team, Executive Summary

• NCJ Number: 309065
• Author(s): B. Heidi Ellis
• Date Published: 2023
• Length: 6 pages
• Grant Number(s): 2020-ZA-CX-0002
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical)

Annotation

This executive summary provides an overview of the evaluation of the MassBay Threat Assessment Team (MBTAT) undertaken by the Trauma and Community Resilience Center (TCRC).

Abstract

The Trauma and Community Resilience Center (TCRC) at Boston Children’s Hospital conducted a formative evaluation of the Massachusetts Bay Threat Assessment Team (MBTAT). Findings identified that the MBTAT has a developed meeting structure, including monthly meetings reserved for updates and training as well as biweekly consultation meetings. In addition, the team developed management teams to monitor implementation of discussed strategies for cases. The team receives and assesses referrals, responds to the needs of the community and referrals, and is multidisciplinary in nature. Strengths of the MBTAT team include that the team is flexible and multidisciplinary. Recommendations for next steps include further work in understanding how MTAMTs can best operate given existing legal and ethical limitations to information sharing and develop processes and procedures for management teams. The MBTAT is an FBI-convened community-based threat assessment and management team serving four states (MA, RI, NH, ME) composed of leading experts in the field of threat assessment as well as community partners. The purpose of this team is to identify, assess, and manage situations where there is a risk of targeted violence. The goal of this evaluation was to identify key components of the MBTAT as an exemplar of a community-based multidisciplinary threat assessment and management team (MTAMT) and understand how those components relate to desired outcomes as defined by the team. MBTAT leadership made iterative changes to programming throughout the course of the formative evaluation. The resulting logic model captures the core operations of the MBTAT. This formative evaluation over the course of 13 months examined how the MBTAT defines success, described the core activities and characteristics of the MBTAT, and studied barriers to and strategies for implementing these activities.