Behavioral Science and the Secret Service Toward the Prevention of Assassination (1981) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Memoranda
Memoranda
Pages 171-184
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 171... ...
This could result in an unnecessarily high percentage of false positives. Professor Zimring's proposed research design using "proxy" behaviors could help to answer this question if subpopulations are sampled from persons with and without mental histories across categories of persons receiving various Service interventions.
|
From page 172... ...
Thus, the formulation of legal and policy recommendations should be sensitive to empirical findings in the difficult task of balancing competing, legitimate public and private interests. Some Thoughts Stimulated by the Conference (1)
|
From page 173... ...
Bibliography Schwitzgebel, R L., and Schwitzgebel, R
|
From page 175... ...
Professor of Psychology Center for Research on Judgment and Policy University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado There has been considerable research on human judgment and decision-making over the past 25 years. (Persons familiar with the field estimate that the number of empirical papers published in refereed journals exceeds 3,000 and may be as high as 5,000.)
|
From page 176... ...
Such studies would be expensive, time-consuming for both researchers and Secret Service personnel, and have a very low probability of teaching us anything new. In the absence of highly compelling reasons to believe that Secret Service agents or their consultants possess some special abilities heretofore wholly unobserved in other professionals, research that merely recapitulates previous work cannot be justified; therefore it should not be undertaken.
|
From page 177... ...
This research effort has examined the origins and theory of modern terrorism, the mindset and modus operandi of various terrorist groups, the specific problem of political kidnappings, and trends in terrorism. None of these studies specifically addresses evaluating threats to the president and other persons protected by the U
|
From page 178... ...
While the Department of Energy's system for assessing nuclear threat messages is elaborate and involves teams including physicists, psychiatrists, psychologists, propaganda analysts, and persons with other specified skills, portions of this work may provide a model for developing a similar, although necessarily less elaborate, capability in support of Secret Service activities.
|
From page 179... ...
for "proxy studies" of the validity of Secret Service predictions of violent behavior. Without the use of reasonable proxies for attempted assassination, I doubt that validation research in this area can ever be done due to the extremely low base rate of the criterion.
|
From page 180... ...
This was begun in the 1976 study by Hay Associates that the Service commissioned. While improving the reliability of agent judgments will not necessarily lead to increased validity, such an increase in validity is unlikely to occur if the judgments of one agent bear little resemblance to the judgments of another.
|
From page 181... ...
Some problems of the Secret Service agents appear no different than problems confronting emergency room physicians who must evaluate potentially violent persons. The problem is not just "what predictions do we make?
|
From page 182... ...
Secret Service agents and clinicians must make behavioral interventions, but also must develop and implement monitoring procedures which are reasonable (and which, were tragedy to result, would be judged reasonable) in light of present day knowledge.
|
From page 183... ...
University of Chicago Law School Chicago, Illinois This memorandum outlines three research soundings the United States Secret Service might undertake. The first two would involve agency files and field staff follow-up, while the third requires a prospective experiment comparing the stress interview with alternative techniques.
|
From page 184... ...
Little is known about what determines the volume of different kinds of threats against political figures over time. Since the Service does not control its own "in box," there may be value in modest explorations of variations in different types of jurisdictional threat over time, seasonal variations, and the extent to which publicized events precipitate increases or decreases in the volume of particular types of threatening gestures.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.