Behavioral Science and the Secret Service Toward the Prevention of Assassination (1981) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 129-170
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From page 129... ...
A fair summary statement of the existing literature on the prediction of violent behavior would be that mental health professionals are accurate at best in one out of three predictions of violent behavior that they make. Many reasons can be offered for this figure, perhaps the one most often cited being the low base rate problem -- the fact that in many cases the violent behavior of interest *
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From page 130... ...
The existing research can be criticized on many grounds. The principal, and I think most serious, criticism is that the criterion that is used -- arrest for violent crime, civil commitment for dangerous behavior, or, in some cases, an aggressive act noted on a hospital record -- may in fact underestimate the actual occurrence of violent behavior.
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From page 131... ...
I think, then, that the question is not so much whether various factors in general are related to violent behavior; but, rather, whether in specific cases, patterns can be found where a situation that the person is in tends to elicit violent ways of coping with the stress presented by that situation. In my opinion, it is important for Secret Service agents to be aware of the literature on the clinical prediction of violent behavior.
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From page 132... ...
Stage two assessment might be called victim assessment, in which the "direction of interest" of the individual being assessed receives special attention. Perhaps it is at this second stage, where things like political ideology, membership in groups wishing to overthrow the government, and attribution of the sources of the stress in one's life to political figures are most relevant, rather than in the first stage of assessment for violence potential.
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From page 133... ...
Psychiatrist-in-Chief McLean Hospital Belmont, Massachusetts I, too, have thought about the various questions that have been raised here because most of our experience is based on assessing individuals who have crossed the personal assault line -- who have killed someone, who have demonstrated dangerous behavior, and who are also mentally ill and in institutions for the mentally ill. We could start out by noting that the Secret Service has various types of persons to protect, and not just the president who is now in office.
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From page 134... ...
I think this is an essential part of that kind of process. They certainly have been doing a good job with the mentally ill, at least; and sometimes I think the question of feeling inadequate about what one does is probably related to the factors which I will talk about in a little while.
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From page 135... ...
It is a special task which you have, to be sure. Since your statistics show that the majority of the persons you see are mentally ill, you are obviously into the business of evaluating the mentally ill and taking care of them or recommending some kind of care.
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From page 136... ...
This may be the only opportunity to meet that particular person. I have watched a number of people interview, and those who pace themselves to be insistent and persistent with the interviewee are able to induce stress without relying on an overt stress type of interview.
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From page 137... ...
I would like to caution Secret Service agents about investing too much expertise on the part of professionals. I think that very often you resort to physicians and psychologists and mental health workers in a hospital setting and are relieved that you have the assailant under wraps.
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From page 139... ...
In the area of parole behavior, the evidence about clinical versus statistical prediction is much the same as in other fields. There has not been a lot of study in this particular area, but generally the statistical methods have fared better when pitted against clinical predictions.
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From page 140... ...
Finally, as discussed in John Monahan's monograph, it might be in order to move away from comparing the usefulness of clinical versus statistical prediction to examining the utility of statistical prediction via clinical prediction. Based on this literature I would say that the most relevant issues to discuss in this conference are strategies for dealing with the base rate problem, the need for systematic data collection for this kind of research effort, and the idea that the development and continuing program should be located within the agency.
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From page 141... ...
Appendix K to the Task Force Report: Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, 1967.
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From page 143... ...
Director, Institute of Epidemiology and Behavioral Medicine San Francisco, California Research problems presented by the low base rate for assassination have been raised several times in our discussion thus far. Some of the issues in suicide and suicide research provide interesting and informative parallels which may be relevant here.
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From page 144... ...
The ultimate value of this approach can emerge only through repeated prospective application. This experimental suicide prevention program involved unobtrusive, non-demanding contact maintained with a random sample of the patients who had refused treatment after discharge.
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From page 145... ...
As I am sure you have all seen in the newspapers, it has become fashionable for college students to design atomic bombs instead of writing term papers. Given public discussion of nuclear matters, those things which were once closely guarded secrets are now available to a much larger population; and we see more sophisticated messages which use nuclear terms correctly.
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From page 146... ...
There are some similarities between our problems and those of the Secret Service, especially as concerns methodology. For instance, we, too, are dealing with a low base rate phenomenon.
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From page 147... ...
Thus, the same attitude which conveys confidence to the public may make safety more difficult.^ The implications of these observations by Rothstein are that protected persons need to be confronted with what they are doing when they present a pattern of repeated risk-taking behavior. With regard to excessive risk, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (1969)
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From page 148... ...
While understanding these factors may not be critical in order to deal with an acutely violent situation, understanding is important if one seeks to prevent violence from occurring. Violent behavior is commonly the end product of extreme anger (rage)
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From page 149... ...
Then, at the moment of violence, that person is viewed as an enemy who is deserving of destruction. In the study of violent behavior in both clinical and non-clinical settings, various factors have been identified as predisposing, potentiating, and precipitating violent behavior.
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From page 150... ...
III. Some Techniques for Managing Potentially Violent Persons The management of the potential assassin by the Secret Service involves some direct activities -- contact for assessment and surveillance -- and some indirect activities -- referral of individuals 150
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From page 151... ...
Clinically, violent persons may present any of several diagnostic pictures -- paranoid, manic, antisocial, episodic dyscontrol, and so forth. Nevertheless, the experience of clinicians who have worked with violent persons suggests a number of principles to be considered in the direct contact with a potentially violent person.
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From page 152... ...
With particular reference to the role of law enforcement personnel in their contact with potentially violent people, Toch observes that "police officers sometimes unwittingly cooperate with self-defined champions by letting them play the role and crowding them into a duel." That is, the law enforcement officer may, by the way he approaches and deals with a potentially violent person, significantly potentiate and provoke a violent outcome. Further, the potential for violence may be influenced by those persons who gravitate to the law enforcement profession to satisfy unconscious wishes to express violent impulses as well as to reinforce inner controls for those impulses.
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From page 153... ...
And whereas much police violence springs out of adaptations to police work rather than out of problems of infancy, the result, in practice, is almost the same.20 One may assume that the Secret Service selection processes are much more rigorous than those of the police departments studies by Toch. Nonetheless, the training of Secret Service agents should be addressed to the potential errors that can be made in the interaction with a potentially violent person which increase the likelihood of a violent outcome.
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From page 154... ...
H Frazier and colleagues, "Problems in Assessing and Managing Dangerous Behavior, paper prepared for the Workshop on Behavioral Research and the Secret Service: Problems in Assessing and Managing Dangerous Behavior, Washington, D
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From page 155... ...
During that period of time, one had a sense of the enormous impact of an event like this, not just on the people who came from all over the world, but as evidenced by the largest assemblage of heads of state in the history of the world attending the funeral. I had a chance to talk to some of the Secret Service agents, and it was very clear that they too were profoundly affected.
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From page 156... ...
We are going to start by telling you what we cannot do." He proceeded to explain the commitment laws of the State of New York, the fact that we could not be involved in preventive detention, that essentially where we could help was if someone was clearly mentally ill and in our judgment represented a danger to himself or someone else. We tried to give a feel for what the ground rules are in our world, the world of the psychiatric hospital in New York City.
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From page 157... ...
One we hospitalized, clearly mentally ill, a chronic paranoid schizophrenic who was up in the Waldorf looking for Senator Kennedy who "owed him a lot of money"; he himself was "a billionaire," had "23 Nobel prizes", and all the rest, and was very angry about all this money that Senator Kennedy owed him. When he came to the emergency room, the question of mental illness was clear, but the dangerousness determination was made by the clinical director together with our resident's perception of the agents' expertise in this regard.
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From page 158... ...
We think that is another way they have of getting the kinds of information that they need to do their job, and I cannot think of a way that we could more misserve them than to try to turn them into amateur mental health professionals. We would, however, like to experiment with ways in which we could reinforce each other's adequacies in dealing with problems of great mutual interest.
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From page 159... ...
I should think that being identified by the Secret Service as a threat to the president or another protected person could have really quite devastating effects on the life of the person into whose world this intervention comes. An argument for humility in intervention grows out of the statistics that John Monahan gave us -- that mental health professionals have, at best, a one-in-three success rate in predicting dangerous behavior.
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From page 160... ...
As for the mentally ill or arguably mentally ill suspect, each state has a commitment law which defines mental illness and defines what kinds of consequences can flow from that characterization. In thinking about Secret Service intervention, it is important to consider not only the mandate of the Service to protect the person of the president and certain other enumerated people, but also to consider the structure of constitutional principles and laws which limit the Secret Service as well as all other policing agencies.
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From page 161... ...
The problem with intervention in that situation is still more acute. We do, at least, have some laws and some intellectual constructs for justifying intervention to prevent dangerous behavior by people who are arguably mentally ill; but if one is talking about people who are not, then from the standpoint of law and ethics one has an even more complicated problem.
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From page 162... ...
They are fundamental questions about how we have ordered our affairs as a society. This leads me back to the point that Dave Hamburg has raised in this conference, namely to think about other ways in which we can facilitate the Secret Service in the discharge of its responsibilites through altering the behavior of protected persons.
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From page 163... ...
Shifting to another issue, we are talking about a population of persons at least a significant portion of whom demonstrate behaviors that would suggest that mental health professionals might have relevant expertise regarding their management. However, these persons are not identified as patients and do not have doctor-patient or caretaker-patient relationships with mental health professionals.
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From page 164... ...
It might be that the best way to guarantee the safety of protected persons, and at the same time to respect the rights of citizens in whom the Service becomes interested, is to assume a helping role -- as exemplified, for instance, by sending a "dangerous" subject on vacation for the week that the president is in town. The other tension that we have discussed is the tension between two basic frames of reference in ethical discourse, the consequentialist and the deontologic.
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From page 165... ...
Instead, what the Secret Service can expect from the mental health care system is a series of acute interventions for people with chronic diseases who have as a recurring symptom threats to protected persons. This is not a rational treatment strategy; it simply reflects the general irrationality of the treatment offered the chronically mentally ill.
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From page 167... ...
These short-term investigative detentions on the standard of reasonable suspicion provide law enforcement officers a significant weapon in the crime prevention effort. Second, as some of the Secret Service representatives pointed out in the planning session for this conference, the Secret Service surveillance and investigation may in itself have deterrent value.
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From page 168... ...
There may be some hypothetical legal cause of action by the person under surveillance, but so long as the decision to undertake the surveillance is reasonable, I suspect courts will err on the side of approving the investigative conduct, especially in light of the minimal nature of the intrusion compared to the significance of the Secret Service protective function. Third, many state law provisions for emergency civil commitment may permit constitutional restraint of the acutely mentally ill at least for a period sufficient to permit the protected person to finish his visit and leave town.
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From page 169... ...
Associate Professor Department of Psychology California Lutheran College Thousand Oaks, California I would like briefly to discuss some of the things that go into weighing competing interests. The Supreme Court in the Watts case^, set out some issues in viewing 18 USC 871, the so-called "threat statute," with which we are in some measure concerned here today.
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From page 170... ...
We need a really serious and honest look at the processing of these people; and where critical legal issues are raised, we need to begin to develop guidelines for handling such persons. Notes 1.
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