Effort launched to track future shooters
Case of Santa Fe man highlights challenges of assessing threats
SANTA FE — When Damon Burns decided to confront the Santa Fe Police Department, its officers could see him coming a mile away.
After a series of agitated phone calls in which he demanded to speak to the chief, Burns resolved to seek a personal audience. A combination of medical and legal issues has prevented the 59-year-old from holding a driver’s license. In recent years, his only transportation has been a red Craftsman lawn tractor.
“It looks old,” he said. “But lots of people have older-style cars.” Traveling at 5 mph, he estimated the trip to the town’s justice center took about 35 minutes.
Burns is well known to local police, having compiled a list of misdemeanor charges over the years.
This day in October 2018, however, police saw something more menacing. “Mr. Burns stated he called the Santa Fe PD to inform us he was part of a 3 percent militia organization which was armed and they were preparing tactical measures to protect the citizens of Santa Fe,” an officer wrote in his report.
After Burns’ lawnmower chugged into the parking lot, police surrounded him, handcuffed him and took him to jail.
With strong gun restrictions a nonstarter in Texas, even after the deaths of 72 people in five mass shootings since 2016, politicians have sought alternative responses to the violence. After massacres in El Paso and Midland-Odessa in August, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a series of executive orders “to better protect our communities and our residents from mass shootings.”
Most focused on how to better collect, interpret and act on information about suspicious people before they can do harm. That process — threat assessment — is having a moment.
Texas legislators this year passed a law requiring schools to create threat assessment teams. In Congress, the Threat Assessment, Prevention and
Safety Act of 2019 would create a national strategy and help locals set up teams to identify future mass killers. The Association of Threat Assessment Professionals is growing so fast it had to cap the number of attendees at its latest conference.
The idea that if given enough dots to connect, analysts can interrupt mayhem is seductive. Yet even experts in the field concede that much of the work is preliminary and that in many ways its promise remains greater than the reality.
“It’s very much in the beginning stages,” said James Silver, a criminal justice professor at Worcester State University in Massachusetts who has worked with the FBI on threat assessment studies. “We’re nowhere near able to predict.”
Burns said that if police had bothered to meet with him, they’d have easily determined he wasn’t a threat.
Although his rap sheet is lengthy, most of the charges are old: public intoxication, driving while intoxicated, seat belt violations. But it also includes a 14-year-old domestic violence misdemeanor involving his adult son.
“He speaks his mind,” said his daughter.
“A big mouth,” added his ex-wife.
“Disagreeable,” according to his attorney.
Burns conceded his phone calls to the police “got pretty heated.”
But he added: “I’m not some extremist. I’m not going to go shoot up the police department, OK?”
While studies consistently have found no reliable demographic profile of a mass shooter, researchers say their work has yielded insights into how people behave before deadly events.
Most incidents are not spontaneous but are planned. Contrary to the stereotype of the isolated madman, studies have found “leakage”— killers communicate their intent through hints to friends and acquaintances or in writings. They generally don’t directly threaten, however.
False positives
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said he has started implementing the governor’s threat assessment orders. Speaking to legislators in September, he said the agency is developing new, more detailed intake forms for citizens reporting suspicious activity.
It also is beefing up Texas’s network of “fusion centers,” regional law enforcement hubs that collect and analyze information to identify threats. McCraw said he hopes to hire 150 new analysts and troopers at a proposed cost of $59 million over the next two years.
Mass shooters are statistically rare, making conclusions about them as a group tenuous. Studies have been overwhelmingly observational — researchers retrospectively identify clues to describe an outcome they already know.
Although a handful of concerning behaviors — identifying with previous attackers or stockpiling weapons — seems to indicate an imminent attack, others such as poor sleep or hygiene or recent life stressors can describe many people.
“A lot of the variables associated with somebody who does these things are also associated with somebody who doesn’t,” said Neil Shortland, director of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. “There are a huge number of false positives — people who may look risky but who never are going to do anything.”
On the ground, separating signal from static becomes even more difficult as police expand their citizen reporting efforts, such as Texas’ Suspicious Activity Reporting Network. After last year’s shooting in Florida, in which a former student killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the FBI received more than 3,500 calls and tips per day.
“There’s a lot of noise out there,” said Matthew Doherty, former head of the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center.
McCraw said DPS analysts hope to use computers and artificial intelligence to help sort the incoming information. Yet Dewey Cornell, a University of Virginia professor considered a national authority on school threat assessments, is skeptical of programs that scan social media for posts that supposedly signal impending danger. His research has found that teenagers, especially, are prone to make emotional but empty threats.
‘A prevention model’
Cornell said that even when a threatening person is identified, law enforcement usually is a small part of the response. The program he teaches to school districts stresses prevention and intensive mental health intervention.
As a police officer, “you wait for someone to commit a crime, swoop in and arrest them,” said Vicki King, a former assistant chief of the Houston Police Department. Now that she is head of threat assessment for the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Health Science Center at Houston, her perspective has shifted.
“This is not an arrest model, but a prevention model,” she said.
She recalled an incident when a man refused to leave the university president’s office. After taking him to lunch, she asked to look in his backpack and discovered personal writings describing a cancer cure he was desperate to explain. In his car was a handgun and ammunition. King said he agreed to mental health treatment; recently, she received a thank you note from him.
“Police need to get their mindset around the fact that most threat assessment cases will not result in arrest and conviction,” Doherty said .
That wasn’t Burns’ experience.
Searching him, police found only a knife — which Burns said he uses in his work as a handyman. Despite not possessing a gun or having any felony convictions, he was charged as a felon in possession of a firearm. Although a license is not required to operate agricultural tractors, he was charged with driving his tractor without a valid driver’s license. His bail was set at $26,000; his lawnmower was impounded.
Police obtained a search warrant by incorrectly telling a judge that Burns was a felon, court records show. After searching his trailer, they found ammunition but no guns.
Burns paid $1,500 to get out of jail and another $150 to spring his lawnmower. Soon after, prosecutors dismissed the gun charge. The lawnmower driving charge was tossed later.
It’s unclear whether police genuinely felt threatened or were merely fed-up.
Last month, Burns sued the department. “I’m going to hit them where it hurts,” he said. “I’m going to take them to court.”
“As a patriot, that’s what we’re supposed to do.”