Rick Kaufman, an expert and speaker on emergency management, threat assessment, and crisis communications, is delivering a keynote address at Behavioural Analysis 2025, a 3-day conference in Minneapolis, June 24-26, exploring how negative intent and potential security threats can be identified through observation, human intuition, and investigative interviewing.
Rick Kaufman was among the first to arrive at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, when a killing spree committed by two students ended with 13 people dead and 26 wounded, providing emergency triage and rescue services before assuming co-leadership of the Columbine Crisis Response Team.
Though not the first mass school shooting, the scale of the tragedy and the media attention Columbine received caused it to become a symbol of school shootings in the U.S., catalyzing and influencing discussions about school violence, security policies, and countermeasures. And for the past 25 years, Kaufman has been at the forefront of those discussions.
Today, Kaufman is Executive Director for Community Relations & Emergency Management at Bloomington Public Schools in Minnesota. Through engagement with hundreds of law enforcement and emergency management agencies, and school systems throughout the U.S., Kaufman has worked to improve safety and security at educational institutions, often spreading his message that there should be more focus on prevention, intervention, and behavioral threat assessment and management, and comparatively less on technology and response.
A lot of the issue is that schools feel pressure in the wake of tragic incidents to show they’re doing something, and so they are good targets for advertisements, often tempted into spending their dollars on hardware and shiny objects. — Rick Kaufman
While target hardening, access control, visitor management systems, and other electronic tools are critically important, they are only part of the answer and too often dominate security strategy, according to Kaufman.
A More Effective Path, Focused on Prevention
Kaufman makes the point that target hardening is based on a premise of “keeping bad actors” out, but mass violence is most often committed by individuals with legitimate access to a facility—people who typically find it easy to get around security policies, procedures, and existing safety measures. Technology can only do so much, according to Kaufman, pointing to recent shootings in the U.S. at schools that all had expensive weapons detection systems in place.
Problematically, Kaufman says he has often seen excessive investment in unproven technology solutions to prevent mass violence.
After his work at Columbine, Kaufman responded to multiple requests from other schools suffering incidents. “What I found after getting those calls is that we were getting pretty good at incident response but not doing as well on the prevention side of the equation, or in identifying students at risk and responding with early intervention.”
To effectively manage risk, schools (and institutions facing similar risks) must recognize when people in need of help and re-direct them to the support they need, which requires investments in people and programs to support human-centric incident prevention.
“In my current district in Minnesota, I initiated school safety training for all new employees, volunteers, coaches—anyone working with students—and hold two training sessions within their first 30 days, stressing the importance of connection with kids, because the most important thing to security and for prevention is situational analysis,” said Kaufman. “It’s necessary for staff understand their roles and responsibilities and to have knowledge about patterns of behavior, and then to have the tools to intervene—it really does all come back to the adage of see something, say something, and do something.” It doesn’t require excessive amounts of training, he says, but some instruction is necessary to raise awareness and sensitivity to early signs of trouble.
At an industry and professional level, Kaufman thinks it is critical to advance understanding of best practices, making learning opportunities for professionals extremely important, including Behavioural Analysis 2025, a 3-day conference in Minneapolis, June 24-26, where he will be delivering one of the keynote addresses. Such workshops are vital for knowledge transfer and to advance educational standards for the counselors, psychologists, and other professionals who are the driving force behind a preventative security approach to mass violence.
“A student on hell bent on causing destruction will find a way, so one of the reasons I am excited to be a speaker is to help people walk away with the understanding that we have to interrupt the pathway to violence,” he said. “We are coming up on the 26th anniversary of the tragedy at Columbine and we have learned so much since then about threat indicators, escalating indicators, and other key pieces of information for prevention. We have such a better understanding of how we can develop the situational awareness necessary to recognize, intervene and prevent incidents and end the scourge.”
Are We Making Progress?
Although greater awareness is needed, Kaufman says he has been seeing some positive indications of late that institutions are getting the message that human-based initiatives are critical, and that technology and target hardening can only do so much. Helping to make the case is the fact that it is far less expensive to focus on upstream behavioral management of problems than on technology solutions and incident response.
“Prevention is so much cheaper,” said Kaufman. “There can be a perception that counselors, social workers, and emergency managers are expensive, but having lived through Columbine, I know the return on investment is so much greater.”
Prevention is so much cheaper.
Gaining awareness of the value of human-based prevention is difficult because, compared to mass shootings, there is little attention given to cases where troubled students are identified and successfully helped. “Averted incidents are the most untold stories,” said Kaufman. “You hear about them occasionally, but the reality is that there are a lot of those.”
“It is when there are muti-tiered systems of support and security and safety systems working hand-in-hand with human capital that you can avert an incident,” he said. “When prevention occurs, it is almost always because of humans intervening and doing something about it.”
Followers and members of the International Security Ligue can use discount code BA25ISL20 for 20% off the conference price. Register at: https://behaviouralanalysis.com/registration/